By Irene Anastasiadis
Boston University News Service
Massachusetts resident and entrepreneur Paul English developed “SpamStrike,” a free app that prevents political text spam during election season.
Spamstrike is an iOS app that blocks texts containing specific keywords associated with political campaigns, such as candidate names or words like “vote.” It aims to provide community service and help people reclaim control of their inboxes.
The app uses artificial intelligence to learn more about the types of spam it should filter and allows users to customize their list by inputting keywords. You can turn the filter on and off whenever you want and access the spam folder, where all messages flagged as spam are stored.
Political campaign spam texts, calls and emails are not new to this election or previous election cycles. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has specific rules for political campaign robocalls and robotexts.
“In general, robocalls and robotexts to mobile phones require prior consent,” according to the FCC. However, manually sent messages do not.
Vinayak Ranade, one of the founding members of Spamstrike alongside English, explains that everyone receives spam texts from marketing agencies, scammers and other businesses. For commercial texts, the consent must be written, but for non-commercial texts, like political reasons, consent can be oral, according to the FCC.
Ranade said that America has significant regulations to protect consumers and their privacy. Still, he said he doesn’t think these protections apply to politics and elections in the same way.
Ranade and English have been technology entrepreneurs and friends for years. One evening at dinner, Ranade’s phone dinged with “yet another spam text from a political campaign [he] did not sign up for,” and they both decided that something should be done about this. A month or two later, the app was created.
Ranade said , Spamstrike, which keeps a live count of the number of blocked spam texts for every user to see, has successfully blocked 200,000 spam texts.
Ankit Adimala, 21, from New Jersey, is a data science and business senior at Northeastern University and one of the millions of people receiving political spam texts. He said he’s received political texts from state representatives in his hometown and for the presidential election. Adimala also said he’s gotten texts trying to collect campaign donations from both parties and other texts reminding him to vote.
“I don’t want to put myself into a bubble and block out everything. I still want to get that information, but I think it could be useful to block some of that,” Adimala said about whether he would use an app like this.
Ranade said that people receive many random political spam texts because of data sharing between political campaigns, which they sometimes don’t knowingly opt into.
“The chances that that data is gonna travel farther than you expect are quite high,” Ranade said about giving your phone number when you sign a petition or even donate to a campaign, for example. He said the average citizen doesn’t fully understand how and when this happens and he hopes Spamstrike can help create more awareness.
On the other hand, BU Junior Emily Wang has a different perspective.
As a communications student, Wang said she understands the importance of campaign advertisements and the need to collect information/data. Wang said she doesn’t feel too overwhelmed by it.
“I’ve done my duty and I voted, and I also feel like, as a college student, I know what is going on,” Wang said. She is actively having these conversations during dinner or in class, she said.
Wang said she doesn’t feel the need to use an app like Spamstrike. She said that getting the texts and deleting them is less work than downloading an app; she would rather get rid of them herself.
Michelle Johnson, Professor Emerita of BU Journalism, said she has received multiple texts daily for months. Having been through numerous election cycles, Johnson said she’s seen an increase in spam intensity.
“The volume [has] just gotten a little bit ridiculous,” Johnson said.
Johnson said that SpamStrike and similar apps could be beneficial for freeing up storage space, but noted that people should be wary even with apps like this because data is never 100% safe.
According to the app store, SpamsStrike asks for your phone number, identification and user content, such as emails and text messages, for analytics, product personalization and app functionality. The app needs access to your contact lists but vows “not to touch any messages from seders in your contacts,” according to SpamStrike.com. It’s also made clear that the data you give will not be linked to your identity.
Angelina Kapllani, 19, a public relations major at BU from New York, has already mailed in her ballot. She said she’s received two-three texts and around 10 emails daily from the Harris campaign asking her to vote.
“It’s so overwhelming. I always have my phone on ‘do not disturb’ and when I take it off temporarily for something, I’m bombarded with these texts,” Kapllani said. “I just get really frustrated.”
At first, Kapllani said she felt “felt seen” when her phone consistently dinged with texts. Since it was her first election as an eligible voter, she said she was “excited to get out there and make a difference.” Not long after though, Kapllani said she grew more annoyed.
“It felt like an invasion of my privacy to get texts like that,” Kapllani said.
Although Kapllani did not have any texts in her SMS inbox because she deleted them as they came, she said she had more than a dozen emails from the past few days.
Kapllani said she would use the app for her peace of mind. “I don’t want to get texts all the time.”
Ranade said he has received a lot of positive feedback on this app, with people saying they’re thankful that there is something to filter out these spam texts. Ranade said that the problem of overflowing inboxes extends beyond political spam texts. On the Apple app store, SpamStrike says it hopes future updates will include phone call spam filtering.
