Free VoIP service, for a price (your privacy)
Being the busy, frugal SMB IT professional that you are, you’re always looking for ways to do things quicker and cheaper. When it comes to phone service, that might mean switching to VoIP.
After all, VoIP is generally easier to manage and less expensive than traditional landline service. What you sacrifice in call quality, your reasoning goes, you more than make up for in setup time and cost.
But what else would you be willing to sacrifice? If you could get VoIP service completely free of charge, would you allow your service provider to eavesdrop on your calls? One company, Pudding Media of San Jose, is hoping you will.
According to a report in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times, Pudding is offering free Internet phone service in exchange for the right to listen in on calls in order to display relevant advertisements on users’ computer screens based on the content of conversations, in real time.
This is how it works, as reported in the Times:
Voice recognition software monitors the calls, selects ads based on what it hears and pushes the ads to the subscriber’s computer screen while he or she is still talking.
A conversation about movies, for example, will elicit movie reviews and ads for new films that the caller will see during the conversation. …
Funny, I was just thinking that between the National Security Agency and corporate marketers, there really aren’t enough organizations spying on my every movement and monitoring my every word.
Seriously, when I read this yesterday I thought it was a joke. Who in their right mind would willingly let a startup media company listen to their most intimate conversations just to save $25 a month? Not to mention, how creepy would it be when, after casually mentioning on a call to a friend or colleague the snack you had at the movies last night, an ad for Junior Mints or Jujy Fruit popped up on your laptop screen?
I know SMBs — actually, companies of all sizes — are always looking for ways to save a few bucks. But this is just too much of a sacrifice. Granted, the Pudding service is not aimed at the enterprise market, but if the company gets even one organization to use this in a corporate setting, I’d be shocked.
As for consumers, I really hope most people value their privacy enough to resist the temptation of free phone service. If not, and Pudding proves a success, society will have lost yet another battle in the larger war to protect personal privacy, and we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Posted: September 25th, 2007 under VoIP.
I agree it’s hard to imagine that businesses or individuals would give up a constitutional right to save a few pennies. Surely most businesses and individuals would pay a reasonable fee to protect the privacy of Internet-based communication rather than take the risk of exposure to online predators. Both IP telephony and email users are at risk…but effective, affordable solutions are available. For example, email users can visit www.consealmail.com for a quick, easy way to protect the privacy and confidentiality of their personal and business email.
Comment by Barry Grace — September 26, 2007 @ 11:13 am
This will be greeted the same as spam and adware, IGNORED. We as consumers are constantly bombarded with this kind of crap which we usually disregard.
Although, a free cellular phone with free service with ads might get a few eagar users.
Comment by mark henderson — September 26, 2007 @ 11:58 am
I can see a few people both sides of the pond wanting to sign up for this type of service, because they do not believe it will effect them or managers signing up for it becuase their staff would be using it.
But how many steps is it from this to the courts using the same technology with the justification that the pecident is that they are being used by companies already. Marks point is interesting along the lines of how long will it be before companies that have subscribed to this telecoms service are being offered a service from companies like lava-soft offering to give them the latest version of Ada-ware that will block the displayied images.
One also assumes that the adverts that are displayed are company friendly, for example I dont want my staff talking to and in an aside mentioning that they have an apointment are company xyz who are based in whitehouse, 123 long lane, anywhere and have an advert pop up on a company computer for that adult magazine or website…
VoIP is still a developing market and along with SIP technology it has the potential to not only save people within business a lot of money not just in bills but also through the use of IP and Voip telephones the saving of costs in cabling as you can route the cabling for your computer through your telephone handset halving the amount of cables running to staff’s desks.
So the savings are their for companies without having to resort to salling marketing information to their telephone providor… because basically this is what this whole offer sounds like … how much of a step is it before pudding start selling that data on to third parties like so many marketing companies.
Not only do that have a list of all the numbers you have dialed but they with voice software would in the long run be able to sell data regarding the person who answers the phones name, age, company they work for, favourite brand of what ever all information sales guys love for leads to allow them to cold call etc… or how long is it before Pudding or any other company offering this service has a list of my client base? And once they have that list what will they do with it? If they are tracking my calls then if we have any customers having an issue then a marketing company knows about it before I have had a chance to even offer a solution… I know I am being very big brother-esk but it does seem like the next evolution of this
Comment by Daniel Warren — September 27, 2007 @ 3:15 am