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T-Mobile introduce fines from Jan 1 for "Code of Conduct" violations
- Baldbvrhunter 3y ago5 PROHIBITED CAMPAIGN CONTENT 5.1 Unlawful, Unapproved, or Illicit Content No messaging programs can run on the T-Mobile that may promote unlawful, unapproved, or illicit content, including but not limited to: • SPAM; • Fraudulent or misleading messages; • Depictions or endorsements of violence; • Inappropriate content; • Profanity or hate speech; • Endorsement of illegal drugs
- cobertos 3y ago"Inappropriate content" feels so vague as to cover any objections T-Mobile could ever have with a bulk send campaign. Though I imagine T-Mobile probably doesn't care if you keep paying and customers don't complain.
- Someone 3y ago> The non-compliance fine(s) (USD) will be assessed for every Sev-0 violation issued as follows: > Tier 1: $2,000, for phishing, smishing, and social engineering > Social Engineering refers to the practice of targeting individuals in a way that manipulates individuals to reveal private information like credit card numbers, or social security numbers. > Tier 2: $1,000, for illegal content (included content must be legal in all 50 states and federally) > Illegal content includes, but is not limited to, Cannabis, Marijuana, CBD, Illegal Prescriptions, and Solicitation. > Tier 3: $500, for all other violations including, but not limited to, SHAFT > Please review the T-Mobile Code of Conduct Section 5.2 for a list of all disallowed content Section 5.2 mentions, a.o, gambling, payday loans and work from home programs. The code of conduct also discusses opt out, that high opt-out rates will warrant investigation, etc This is limited to customers using their “bandwidth” service for sending messages en mass. So, I think this is a good change. (If it weren’t, it would be very bad, as it would mean discussing where one can get an abortion can cost you $1000, because that isn’t legal in all 50 states) They also don’t mention how they will enforce those rules. Will they read all messages sent through that service?
- ourmandave 3y agoSHAFT is a handy acronym to help you remember types of content which is either forbidden or subject to special rules. S: Secually inappropriate content H: Hate speech or profanity A: Alcohol F: Firearms, and depictions or endorsements of violence T: Tobacco (including vaping), or endorsement of illegal or illicit drugs, including marijuana and cannabis In addition to the above, the promotion of gambling is not allowed. https://www.10dlc.org/en/shaft https://www.10dlc.org/en/shaft Edit: Actually the 10dlc.org T-Mobile code-of-conduct links to a 2020 pdf. Somebody should probably tell 'em. =)
- pradn 3y agoThis is just like FAANG where they forget to include a major player like Microsoft. (Maybe it was legacy before Satya, but Azure and AI have brought it back to the front.)
- grobbyy 3y agoFAANG wasn't about size but about things like salary, benefits, and looking good on a resume. Microsoft is doing better now, but it's employment conditions aren't the same as FAANG (and no where near the luxuries of when it was coined).
- astrange 3y agoWasn't FAANG specifically about the stock always going straight up? Amazon didn't look that good on a resume and "we're going to fire you the instant you underperform" Netflix wasn't that great a working environment.
- _heimdall 3y agoUs this is what I remember as well, FAANG was just short for a collection of specific stocks that performed well...and by that I mean that were regularly hyped and pumped regardless of normal indicators like profit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yard2010 3y agoThere are so many phishing and scamming cases, now T-Mobile wants their share of the pie too :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- taurath 3y agoThis thread may need an updated title to clarify that this is regarding their mass messaging service. Still wild about it being the lowest common denominator of state laws.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jraph 3y agoIsn't it weird / dangerous that the service provider polices and fines its customers, and not the police? The lack of separation of concerns seems strange, I would also expect that such rules should be laws built from whatever regular system coming from the country, which is hopefully, at least theoretically, democratic?
- Shekelphile 3y agoWouldn't really call it dangerous, ISPs have always cut off people from service doing illegal/unethical things. The weird part is that they're putting a price on it now... implying that it's OK to use their pipe to engage in crime and do morally dubious stuff like swindle old people out of their money as long as they get a cut too.
- AgentOrange1234 3y agoIs it a low price that will give them a cut, or is it high enough to be an effective deterrent?
- fhsm 3y agoSounds exactly like fine as price in the making. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=180117 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=180117
- maxerickson 3y agoNo? They are managing the relationship they have with their consumer customers by enforcing a code of content for commercial customers that communicate with them. I guess there is an argument that the service should be a utility, but I don't think there are currently laws that would force them to carry messages that they expect to be a net harm to their business.
- norwalkbear 3y agoYes, but America is a banana Republic now
- dec0dedab0de 3y agoSo they’re going to fine people with viruses? That’s probably a good thing overall, but will there be a warning first? What if someone just refuses to pay? then switches providers?
- cobertos 3y agoThis is for bulk senders. I imagine it's hard to negotiate a new contract with a different provider on short notice, especially if your reason for leaving is "ahh, we got fined too much for sending unwanted messages".
- dec0dedab0de 3y agoahh, so a bulk sender is a specific contract, as opposed to just any account sending over a certain threshold. got it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mmaunder 3y agoThis is not for their consumer cell network. It’s for this: https://www.bandwidth.com/ https://www.bandwidth.com/
- whaleofatw2022 3y agoUggh, Bandwidth. A company that refuses to divulge contact information for a company that sent me an unsolicited, unidentified text message (a clear violation of TCPA). Which is really funny... shouldn't this company want me to get in touch with them if I'm interested?
- otterley 3y agoTCPA requires the service provider to send the recipient the sender’s contact info? If so, have a lawyer send them a letter.
- constrain5795 3y agoI guess I'm a bit confused about your expectations here. Would you expect your ISP to give up your contact info in regards to a DMCA complaint? I certainly wouldn't; I would expect them to do exactly what they (and bandwidth.com) actually do: alert the user that they received a complaint and/or take action against the user themselves.
- whaleofatw2022 3y agoOnce upon a time it was a possible for a prank call to be traced and the child spanked. What is more important is that I provided source and destination numbers alongside times and screenshots of their customer violating the law and the response was a 'durrr, ok'. These providers launder sms and voip spam. I've worked with providers that care about compliance and know when someone DNGAF.
- hknmtt 3y ago> Tier 2: $1,000, for illegal content strange legal system you got there
- constantly 3y agoT-Mobile isn’t technically a legal system so this is referring to them fining for illegal content of their own accord as part of the contractual arrangement. It’s not as if they impanel a jury :)
- sparkling 3y agoThese are B2B contracts. You can put pretty much whatever fines and fees you want in there.
- singleshot_ 3y agoWell, under the restatement (and case law in some states) a liquidated damages provision cannot represent a penalty. Instead, it has to represent an estimate of actual damages in breach, more or less.
- otterley 3y agoAbsent the actual language in the Agreement between T-Mobile and the intermediary providers like bandwidth.com, we have no idea what the penalty is called - bandwidth.com is calling it a “fine” but we don’t really know.
- petee 3y agoThe fact that phishing and scamming are a fine, and not immediate termination/referral to the cops is embarrassing
- NavinF 3y agoWhat do you think the cops are gonna do about it?
- petee 3y agoObviously nothing if it doesn't get reported.
- acdha 3y agoProsecute them? It’s not 1994, most countries have a track record of prosecuting internet crime.
- gruez 3y agoAnd what if the perpetrator is half way around the world?
- acdha 3y agoIs T-Mobile is signing commercial contracts with random strangers around the world, that seems like a bigger problem.
- NavinF 3y agoAre you serious? My real name is in my profile; Try filing a police report saying that I engaged in "phishing, smishing, and social engineering". I think you'll find that nothing happens. I can give you some fake evidence if you wanna be extra convincing, but your report will still end up in the junk pile along with the rest
- acdha 3y agoNow try what we’re talking about here: a large business reporting a customer for criminal misuse of their service.
- ryanSrich 3y agoI wonder if phishing simulations are allowed. There's nothing explicit in the code of conduct (at least none that I could find with a quick search). Smishing sims are a great way to train staff on phishing, and disallowing them would be somewhat antithetical to their explicit mission here of protecting they users.
- acdha 3y agoDoes it really make anyone safer? I’d think that time would be better spent deploying WebAuthn so phishing is impossible, and working vendors to reduce the number of legitimate messages which are indistinguishable from phishing.
- flutas 3y agoAt least for the company I work for, to maintain our insurance, we had to be enrolled in a service (KnowBe4) that does nothing but: 1) produce shitty AI voiceover "please don't click email links" videos 2) randomly email, text, etc us with fake stuff trying to get you to click the links. I always report the emails as phishing to Google just hoping one day something gets flagged somewhere on Google's side, but I doubt it will ever happen.
- ryanSrich 3y agoNo one is making you use Knowbe4. As someone that founded a company in this space, the amount of people that hate SAT and Phishing sims purely based on their experience with certain companies is tremendous.
- flutas 3y ago> No one is making you use Knowbe4. My company is, but that's me being pedantic. What I meant "we had to be enrolled in a service" in the "any company that provides this service" and was just giving the current company as an example.
- ryanSrich 3y ago
- grumple 3y agoThis industry is ridiculous. One week's notice about new fines, provided the day before the Christmas holiday? This after the last couple of years of constantly changing requirements for registration of traffic. Meanwhile many of our customers legally sell CBD products. But if one backwards state disallows the content, we could get fined? If one state bans, say, talking about abortion, and our customers in unrelated states discuss it, we can get fined? Since this is already the case, anything health related basically can't use sms on tmobile. And almost no business can safely use sms: we can't track every law in every state.
- avianlyric 3y agoT-Mobiles code-of-conduct, which provides the basis for these fines, dates from November 2020. All that’s changing here is that their code-of-conduct now has more teeth. I would expect that reputable communications provider using T-Mobile already knows if they’re violating the code-of-conduct in a material way because they will have received violation notices in the past. If you’ve been ignoring those notices, and you’re now going to start getting fines, that’s kinda on you. The rules have existed for years, now they greater consequences if you break them.
- grumple 3y agoWe are not directly a tmobile customer. We use Twilio. Our relationship with Tmobile is mediated by them. But ultimately we are a customer, and this is not how you treat customers. We operate numbers for thousands of of businesses. They sell cbd products as some tiny percentage of their business (hell, you can get cbd at convenience stores now). We can ban the word cbd, but we can't stop evasion. And the carriers are not cooperative about sharing techniques for detecting illegal content. And again, the verbiage saying we can't send content that is illegal in a single state has never been communicated before. As I just stated, the abortion example makes it clear that this is a big problem. It is an unreasonably broad restriction. These fines are excessive in any case. What I'm going to recommend to my company is dropping all our tmobile numbers and to stop sending to tmobile customers, while we continue to explore non-sms alternatives for direct messaging.
- adamfarhadi 3y agoEdit: I misread the article
- getcrunk 3y agoRead tfa. This is about spammers and sms
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lakpan 3y agoIt’s always “funny” to me when I see private companies and establishments trying to “fine” their customers. I refuse to pay, what are you going to do? Would this ever hold in court?
- avianlyric 3y agoYou know what a breach of contract is right? That’s basically what civil court exist to adjudicate, and why bailiffs exist. As long as the contract isn’t judged as being unfair (which is very unlikely), then yeah a court will uphold it, and court bailiff will confiscate property to see the fine paid.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jncfhnb 3y agoThat’s not accurate. I mean yeah you qualified this by saying it could be unfair but generally speaking this is not right. Bailiffs won’t be seizing your property unless there’s some sort of specific consideration (like a specific unique item that is owed), damages owed (determined by a court), or a belief that the consideration for the payment is already there, which is pretty clearly false for a fine.
- avianlyric 3y agoI think we’re getting hung up on the word fine where. Obviously T-Mobile have no right to “fine” individuals in the same way the government can. But they do have the right to include provisions for monetary consequences for violations of their code-of-conduct into their business agreements. And T-Mobiles customers (I.e. people like Bandwidth), can add provisions to pass those monetary consequences onto their customers in their contracts. Those contract provisions will create a consideration for payment between T-Mobile and their business partner, if their partner breaches the code-of-conduct, and a court will absolutely enforce those provisions. Eventually a court appointed bailiff will be instructed to recover the debt via the confiscation of assets, whether those assets are cash or other property will be entirely down to the solvency of the business the debt is being recovered from.
- quantum_state 3y agoIt seemed that April Fools day came early for T-Mobile
- dfgfek 3y ago[flagged]
- avianlyric 3y agoSome important extra context on these fines. 1. They apply to only to messaging gateways for sending mass messaging campaigns, not consumers. 2. This is part of a long running industry process (since at least 2020) for reducing the abuse of SMS messaging in U.S. for the purposes of spam and phishing. 3. T-Mobiles “Code of Conduct” has existed since November 2020. 4. These new fines are just the latest set of fines for abusing messaging services. Since 2020 a number of fines have been introduced, but they’ve focused initially on simple technical violations (sending mass messages without properly registering your source number, or properly registering your campaign). 5. Reading around, it seems industry players are expecting these violations to be detected via customer complaints, rather than actual scanning messages. It seems the networks don’t have the infrastructure or the interest is mass scanning messages. But if they see unusual levels of complaints from customers, associated with a specific gateway or campaign, then they’ll manually review customer complaints, associated messages and issue the appropriate fines to originating gateway. TL;DR if you’re not mass sending SMS via A2P (application to person) platforms, this has zero impact on. Except you should start getting less spam.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago> Reading around, it seems industry players are expecting these violations to be detected via customer complaints, rather than actual scanning messages. Having worked with quite a few telcos, I’m not surprised. Most of them struggle enough keeping their Lawful Intercept systems running properly (most people would probably be surprised to know how often wiretaps are messed up by service providers). I can’t imagine they’re especially eager to start running content analysis on their SMS traffic.
- KomoD 3y agoThat title is super misleading?
- exabrial 3y agoI honestly don’t want service providers reading any of my messages or performing filtering on my behalf. I find the whole thing a little creepy.
- phendrenad2 3y agoThese rules apply to resellers of T-Mobile's network, not T-Mobile cellphone customers (it may apply to them also, but it would be a PR disaster trying to apply it)
- inemesitaffia 3y agoWhat ASN's does this affect. This is Sprint, right?
- datadeft 3y agoTruly independent peer-to-peer internet when? Seriously, I think more and more about building a LoRa network with friends. https://meshtastic.org/ https://meshtastic.org/
- 1905 3y agoSo I'm going to be fined for streaming a hollywood movie or posting an "offensive" meme?
- novemp 3y ago[dead]
- 1905 3y agoOnly 535 days away from being fined $100 for each of my offensive memes
- pbjtime 3y agoIt's almost like we promised stuff like this would happen without explicit net neutrality.
- RecycledEle 3y agoT-Mobile will issue a $1k fine for anything that is illegal in even one state. For example, billboards are illegal in Hawaii and have been since 1920, so if you do anything with a billboard, that is a $1k fine. Another example, in Hawaii, it is illegal to have more than one alcoholic drink in front of you at once. So if you send a pic like that, it's a $1k fine. In Hawaii it is illegal to have coins in your ear. In Hawaii, it is illegal to have a tattoo on your eyelid or behind your ear. In Hawaii, it's illegal to display captive dolphins or whales. That means almost any depiction of Sea World will get someone a $1k fine on T-Mobile. In Hawaii, twins are not allowed to work for the same company. In Texas it is illegal to have wire cutters with you when near ranch land. In Texas, to hold public office, you must acknowledge the existence of a supreme being. In Alabama it is illegal to dress as a priest for Halloween. In Florida, dads that do not work are considered vagrants. No horse can go faster than 10 MPH on a street in Indiana. In Texas, squealing your tires when you start off is called "Unsafe Acceleration." The use of reptiles in religious ceremonies is against the law in Ketucky. If you buy a pizza for a friend and do not tell them in advance, that's a crime in Louisiana. Psychics are illegal in Pennsylvania. I need to find old T-Mobile commercials and start fining these people. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
- RecycledEle 3y agoAny past T-Mobile commercials that violate their own policies would be false advertising, right? Like if there was a T-Mobile ad shot in a bar, or if there was one where a horse galloped down a public street.
- TheCitizenToxie 3y ago[dead]
- peepaw 3y ago[flagged]
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- jcrewhunk 3y agoThis has been debunked: https://www.aldomedia.com/blog/t-mobile-fines-for-texting-shaft https://www.aldomedia.com/blog/t-mobile-fines-for-texting-sh...