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Comment by pacaro | Hacker News Reader

I think you're downplaying this. The illegitimate use of the address book is being masked by a legitimate use - even if permission is asked for it will likely be granted. What is essentially impossible to control except through manual app verification processes (and very hard even then) is what is done with the data once the app has access to them.

As a total aside, if you are an AT&T customer you can just forward SMS spam to 7726 (SPAM) and they take care of it - I'm not affiliated with AT&T (just a customer) and I wish they would publicize this stuff more.

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Thanks for the information about reporting spam text messages, I had never heard about it. I just received some spam text the other day and ended up reporting it through the FCC, but reporting straight to your mobile operator on the phone is much nicer.

ceejayoz is right about Verizon also supporting this feature (I just reported the spam message I had from the other day). Via https://community.verizonwireless.com/message/696743#696743 :

    From MikeS1_VZW

    We have heard our customers on this, and we have launched a new program
    to help with SPAM. Take one (or several) of the SPAM messages and
    forward it to 7726 (which spells SPAM). This is a new process. Once you
    forward the message to 7726, you will get a reply text message asking
    the identity of the SPAM sender (the "From" address in the SPAM message
    you received). Once received, you will get a "Thank-you" message from
    the 7726 number. We will investigate on the back end.

    The messages you send to and receive from the 7726 number are free of
    charge. This is a brand new program we are testing, and it just started
    on 09/1/11. Please make this common practice when receiving SPAM
    messages. This is not to be confused with alerts though. If you get
    alerts (something you signed up for), you should reply STOP to the
    message received before going the whole 7726 route.

Great info, but given that carriers are paid for every message I receive, I doubt their commitment to fighting text spam.

Here's what I want: a whitelist. If I want to add you to my whitelist, I put my phone into "receiving" mode. I get your text, confirm adding you, then go back into normal mode, where texts from anyone not on the list are rejected and I don't pay for them.

AT&T has a whitelist feature. It's $4.99 per month per subscriber and can allow up to 30 approved numbers to send SMS messages to your phone.

Careful what you wish for. It might end up being implemented as an expensive and useless marketing ploy.

Expensive, yeah. It should be free, actually; my whole gripe is that I don't want to pay to receive messages I didn't even want. It doesn't help if I have to pay not to receive them.

But it does sound useful. And if it gets mindshare, competition could make it cheaper or free.

> Great info, but given that carriers are paid for every message I receive, I doubt their commitment to fighting text spam.

As more people get mobile e-mail, things like iMessage, etc., they're going to have to keep SMS from being overly spammy or people will stop using it.

It would be nice if phones had an option to treat text messages differently if the number isn't in your phone book. I wouldn't care about text message spam so much if it went to a spam folder and didn't alert like a regular text message.

I think you just described how Facebook handles email...

But I agree with you for the most part a distinction between known senders and unknown senders would be great. The only exception to this that I can think of personally, is for things like the Google 2-factor auth messages which appear to be sent from random numbers (in addition to being random numbers!).

There are actually various SMS Spamfilter and general SMS filtering/alerting apps in the Android Market.

I agree -- more people need to be aware of the Mobile spam reporting, it's actually quite cool.

Not just AT&T, hundreds of GSM operators agreed to support 7726. How they react to reports probably varies, though.

Verizon apparently supports, as well.

I think it's just a very fine hair to split that this is malware yet everything before wasn't. This software does not actively do anything else than many apps on the store. It does not contain any malicious code (by itself). Pretty much every app with ads uploads as much information about you as it can. Is broadcasting SMS spam to the gathered data what makes an app malware?

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