Scams on your phone

What irritates you the most about your mobile phone carrier? The "press 1 for this, press 2 for that" rigmarole when you call for help? Their sleight of hand with rates? "Value-added services" that quietly jack up your bills?

A reader came to us last week with an angry complaint about his service provider. He'd had trouble downloading ringtones, and was charged for something he hadn't got. The guys at the counter had been far from helpful; in fact, they had been downright obnoxious. Hundreds of such mobile user stories are waiting to be told

Personally, I am irritated by the text promos my phone company sends for its friendship chat service. These are awfully worded, and cause offence to the copy editor in me. I also know they're trying to lure me into something perfectly useless so that they can make some quick money. (But then, a colleague told me this service wasn't always as innocently useless as I thought. Two years ago a mobile chat service promoted by a newspaper was all the rage on the college campus because his friends could use it to chat, flirt, get a date, hook up, and more.)

But carriers ripping you off when you aren't looking isn't just the usual Indian cleverness at work. David Pogue, my favourite personal tech writer, has been, by his own admission, "ranting about one particularly blatant money-grab by US cellphone carriers: the mandatory 15-second voicemail instructions".

He writes in The New York Times that he is disgusted with canned messages that say things like (I have slightly modified this example to make it sound Indian):

"The number you have called is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press hash for more options." Pogue gives compelling reasons why these messages are outrageous: "First, they waste your time... Second, we're PAYING for these messages."

He calculates that those 15-second messages rake in about 620 million dollars (Rs 3,038 crore) a year for Verizon, one of that country's leading carriers. That's a lot of money about a tenth of Assam's budgetary expenditure for 2009-10!

Pogue is now spearheading a campaign against the scam. He is getting readers of his widely read column to send written complaints to the carriers.

"If enough of us make our unhappiness known, I'll bet they'll change," he says. He believes the volume of complaints will make the mobile companies stop their deceitful ways. There's much we in India could do about the mobile phone scams we live with. A mobile users' association that could lobby against unfair practices, even with a small percentage of Indian mobile users as members, could force service providers to listen to grievances with greater respect and seriousness. Pogue knows where his campaign is heading. He writes: "If they ignore us, we'll shame them. If they respond, we'll celebrate them."

Good luck, David. We will follow your campaign for hope and inspiration.

Research flip-flops

Last week we read about the Nanavati report overturning everything that the Bannerjee committee had said about the Godhra riots. How can two wise judges studying the same sequence of events come to two totally contradictory conclusions?

Interphone, the long-term study on mobile use, has run into a similar problem. Do mobile phones cause cancer? Do they cook the brain with their radiation? Do they impair hearing? The study had to address these questions, but it has ended in a squabble with its researchers not being able to arrive at any consensus.

The mobile is the most popular electronic device in the world today, and the scientists who ought to have enlightened us about its risks are now divided into three groups with differing opinions.

The study began in 2000 and ended in 2006, cost 30 million dollars (a good Rs 140 crore), and involved around 50 scientists working in 13 countries. It tracked 14,000 people. That, by any standards, is a stupendous effort.

A draft of Interphone's findings was circulated in June, and a final paper will be submitted this month. So what do we as mobile users take home from it?

Difficult to say. Single-country reports have already made it to the media, and some suggest, to everyone's amazement, that using a cell phone actually gives you some protection from brain tumours. The Economist reported that this conclusion was so counter-intuitive that the researchers had to acknowledge their methodology was flawed.

One camp among the Interphone scientists believes any increased incidence of tumours shown in the study is because of the recall biases. (The respondents were asked to remember how many times they had used the phone in a week a decade earlier, and for how long. The wisdom now is that the respondents could have gone way off the mark in what they remembered, considering how no one keeps track of the number of minutes they talk over the phone!). Another camp thinks it really has found increased risks of tumours and wants to call for precautionary measures. A third group isn't saying a thing.

Depending on who is giving out a media statement, you could soon read headlines about whether cellphones cause cancer or not. Generally, the media believe such medical stories have little significance, and push them to some corner on the inside pages.

But such stories relate to people's everyday lives. A diabetic I know started eating lots of oranges after reading a news report that said the fruit was good for those with blood sugar problems. He later read a contradictory report and stopped, but the orange eating would have done some damage by then.

Debates are raging about low fat versus high fat, carb versus protein, and such other choices. Some say coffee has beneficial effects, while others say it harms you. So how do you make out what's good for you? Trust your luck. Toss a coin!