I think I will continue to play the skeptic on mobile phones, though I did call it "negligent" once to ignore the issue. There was apparently a recent study out on mobile phone spam. One article included quite a bit of an email I sent the reporter, so I thought I would give you the whole email to compare the quotes in the article to. Here it is:

From the stories I saw, it was not clear to me that "80% of mobile phone users had received spam." [note: this is what the reporter said in her email to me]. There are always details that get ignored. The note I saw qualified the data to reflect Central Europe and Southeast Asia, not the worldwide cell phone user population that you seem to imply (or that I have inferred ). I don’t know what percentage of cell phone users even have messaging services capable and turned on.

The mobile phone business is highly competitive and always looking for ways to differentiate or create new services. It is to their benefit to create demand for these products and services and surveys are a good way to do it. The people who care about mobile phone spam will know it – they’ll be spammed. The biggest risk today is that people will be charged for it by their service provider.

Every form of communication, old and new, gets spammed – from "voice spam" on the streets of NYC to junk mail in my post office box to telemarketers on phones to email messages to whatever. The key difference with technology is that spam is extremely cost effective. Our best defense is to collectively never reply/respond.

From a more general perspective, we should expect this to become a problem in the future (if spammers receive successful responses) although I don’t believe it is a big problem today.

So, what do you think – how did Ms. Shor do? I only noticed one slight miss – my qualification on the nature of the report compared with her characterization of the report that appears to be attributable to me in the article.