September 21, 2010 – T-mobile, a U.S mobile provider, was sued last week for blocking text messages from EZ Texting.com. The text message was said to be sent on behalf of the medical marijuana website called WeedMaps.com. The suit was filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for Southern District of New York. EZ Texting is affiliated with WeedMaps.com and it sends text alerts to customers about centers and cooperatives which provide medical marijuana, as well as the location of doctors. T-mobile allegedly blocked the short code 313131 for WeedMaps and by doing so has overstepped its function as a communication carrier, according to EZ Texting. According to EZ Texting's Chief Executive Shane Neman, T-Mobile didn't supposedly approve of the website. He reiterated that WeedMaps.com is totally legal and what T-mobile did was illegal blocking. EZ's motion for early relief was denied by the court and a hearing will be on September 30. T-mobile, in an email stated that they are glad EZ Texting's appeal for early relief was denied by the court. They called EZ Texting's claims “meritlessâ€. This isn't a common problem since other mobile carriers have experienced the same criticisms from other concerned groups. Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel are just two of the mobile providers which were criticized for allegedly blocking text messages. In fact, to somehow solve this problem, an advocacy group called Public Knowledge has made petitions to the Federal Communications Commission to look at text messages as a means of communication. These messages should be treated in the same way they are doing to phone calls, subjecting the service providers to a rule that prevents them from blocking calls. The petition was filed in 2007 but hasn't been taken up by the agency yet.
cell phones are just tracking devices anyway. Somebody knows where you are, when you are, where youre going....to me thats just too much info for somebody to know about me
I don't see how what you're saying applies to this article at all, mechanix. The problem is that this service texts coupons and other info to people who are subscrbed - I have signed up for these very alerts, and I get one like every couple months and I KNOW that more are being sent as friends on other services get more coupons.. I'm almost postitive Sprint is blocking it on my end too, though oddly enough I did get a text coupon from WeedMaps yesterday...
This is clearly a 1st amendment violation. Glad I dropped t-mobile a month ago when my contract was up. Fuck em.
Maaaan bleepers all the way hahahah, i seriously need to buy a bleeper, phone companies are just controlling way too much now, no freedom or privacy.
if phone companies are noticing text messages pertaining to drugs it only indicates that other specialized surveillance is not out of the question isn't it funny that of 56 thousand active GC'rs only 3 are facebook fans? that's your geography for the day..