Twitter Sued for Sending Back an SMS Cell Message Confirming to Stop

As I have written about in older articles the SMS text message business has some serious legal problems as there are no laws or rules to follow. Eventually what happens is that the biggest offenders are dealt a heavy blow like what happened with email spam companies. Until the laws get worked out lawsuits can happen for very minor infractions.

Let's look at the most recent event involving Twitter. Twitter has a service in which they can update your cell phone every time someone sends you a direct message via Twitter. I use this SMS cell phone messaging service because I have an unlimited texting plan on my phone. Unfortunately many people do not have unlimited texting ability and so if they were to receive quite a few SMS messages to their cell phone from Twitter they could easily begin to rack up charges.

The other day someone started a class action against Twitter for the oddest reason ever, being nice. They knowingly agreed to this Twitter messaging service that sends SMS messages to their phone with Twitter direct messages from their followers. For whatever reason this person decided they no longer wanted to receive these SMS messages from Twitter and so they messaged back STOP. The STOP command is supposed to opt you out of any future SMS messages but Twitter sent one more message back confirming that the user was successfully unsubscribed from the SMS list.

When I look at this situation I do not see that Twitter was attempting to do anything with ill intent. Twitter was simply being courteous to their customer by letting them know the STOP message was successful and they would never again receive SMS text messages from Twitter. I personally would appreciate such a confirmation message from Twitter. Instead of being happy with this confirmation the user decided to setup a class action against Twitter with an estimated payday of about 6 million dollars.

An attorney in a class action lawsuit usually gets about 30 - 40% of a class action settlement. So the ones really reaping the benefits of this litigation will be the lawyers and over something extremely trivial. I simply cannot blame Twitter for doing anything wrong here. The customer may have been hit with an additional 10 - 25 cent charge for that last message sent if they did not have an unlimited texting plan but that is there fault. When signing up for these SMS text services you will see a message that standard texting and data rates will apply.

Until laws are created specifically for SMS text companies you will see more weird lawsuits like this. Fortunately for email marketers and consumers we have specific laws to address email spam and as with the similar service of SMS mobile marketing we need to get laws in place early to prevent future bogus lawsuits from being filed against companies who intend no bad fortune upon their users who use their service for free. In conclusion this Twitter SMS lawsuit is a bunch of bull.

last time modified: July 15, 2011, 4 p.m.