According to the New York Times, AT&T is going to launch a text-message service to send SMS messages to customers in certain locations.

Um, hell no!

It’s called “ShopAlerts” and is designed to allow “brand-partners” (i.e. HP, Kmart, JetBlue, S.C. Johnson, etc.) to send advertisements and coupons to customers who happen to be in range of the “geo-fence” (a pre-defined geographic area around a particular place) for that brand.

The service is opt-in, which makes it a little less about. The troubling thing is it is just another way for people to give up their privacy.

If you allow a service to track when you are *in* a particular place, then by default it will also know when you are *not in* that place. Checking in on Foursquare should be enough of a trigger to send these kinds of advertisements – it shouldn’t be based on a passive location awareness.

In fairness, JetBlue does intend to use their JetBlue Go Places mobile app to offer their program’s points via check-in. According to the article, there is no mention of similar action-requirements. S.C. Johnson intends to put a geo-fence around Wal-Mart to [passively] offer their discounts.

It all sounds eerily similar to the Minority Report’s retina scanners in the shopping malls. Let’s hope the day never comes when you can walk past an adult novelty shop and the on-screen display asks how that sex toy you bought 2 weeks ago has worked out for you. This technology, if extrapolated to track purchases as a response to the ad, combined with the already-present knowledge of your receipt’s items would surely enable such a world.

Don’t opt-in. It’s already easy enough to track you, without making it constantly available.

Technorati Tags: advertisements, at&t, geo-fencing, hp, jetblue, kmart, location-based marketing, presence tracking, privacy, scjohnson, security, shopalerts, walmart

For those of you still finding this blog post, possibly for the reasons it describes, AT&T has discontinued the Xpress Mail service, as of sometime in December 2010. I don’t know the reasons for this, but in my opinion, not getting my work email on my phone is the best thing that has happened to my phone since I first found out I could get work emails on my phone.

Original Content…

For a while I have been using AT&T’s Xpress Mail to get email, calendar, and contact access from my work PC to my AT&T Tilt phone. But this past week, I kept getting a “Cannot Find Server” error on my Xpress Mail desktop client.

I searched the forums over on AT&T’s website and lots of people were having the same problem, and have been since July or so. However, no one was able to figure out a solution for it, nor could they get help from AT&T with it, who apparently didn’t even know there was a problem.

Well, I gave the thread a week to see if anyone had any more information, but there was none. So I decided to see if reinstalling the desktop client would do anything to help…

IT DID!

If you’re having this problem, go download and reinstall the desktop app by logging in here. Once you do that, just re-login to your desktop client again, then go to your phone and re-register it to your desktop client, and you should be good to go.

I tried to register on the forums to post this message, but I couldn’t get my email address verified because the link they sent me always comes back as invalid.

Frankly, I’ve never been impressed with AT&T’s support or their help on anything, and I’ve always found the solution for them – either while on the phone with the tech support person, or before I even call them about it. Their phone/data service is acceptable, but their user support eats ballsack.

Technorati Tags: at&t, cannot find server, express mail, xpress mail, xpress mail client