21st Century Junk Peddlers

Every week, I receive at least ten junk text messages offering me mortgages, cheap air tickets, and fake graduation diploma. Others notify me that I’ve just won some award, offer to kill my enemies or sell me guns. The latest one, which I received just 30 minutes ago, concerns a special medicine that can cure various types of cancer. I used to wonder how these senders could get hold of my mobile number, because I’m usually quite cautious about giving it out. Now I know who is to blame.

CCTV recently pointed out that mobile phone advertising company Focus Wireless, which belongs to Focus Media (Nasdaq: FMCN), accounts for 80% of the junk SMS market. It is said that Focus Wireless has 20-30 people working full time on growing its huge database of personal details, including mobile phone numbers. Compiled over the past eight years, the database reportedly contains information about 200 million people, divided into detailed categories.

Focus Wireless claims to have sorted all the names on its database into nine categories, including apartment compound residents, company owners, car owners, mobile couriers, public servants, insurance brokers, bank workers, and real-estate investors. With the details of almost half of China’s mobile phone users on its database, the company “helps” 200,000+ clients send SMS to targeted groups. This has brought the company huge profits. The “mobile advertising” revenue of Focus Wireless in the first three quarters of 2007 was USD 6 million, USD 10.9 million, and USD 14 million respectively. The CEO of Focus Media once said that Focus Wireless has grown so fast that it was considering a stock market listing as a separate entity.

This sounds scary, but it’s more terrifying when thinking how and where this company got all its information from. People never expected that the personal information they provided when registering, for example, a mobile phone account, would be sold to advertisers. From the categories of information offered by Focus, it is not hard to guess who is selling information (although no one wants to confess it).

So far, there is no kind of law regulating this practice, so we will all have to suffer being woken up by these junk text messages at three in the morning. The technology has developed very fast and, as we are being pushed into the “information era”, it’s time for the social and legal system to catch up.

PS - Our Viewpoint columnist Andy Xie also has plenty to say on the subject of Focus Media.

Claire Li