NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] It's *your* responsibility to backup your voicemail messages
It's *your* responsibility to backup your voicemail messages http://j.mp/GN7OsS (This message on Google+) - - - This story of a man preparing to sue T-Mobile over lost voicemail messages of his deceased daughter, that he was saving long-term on T-Mobile's system, hit the AP wire and so is getting wide publicity. http://j.mp/GN70UP (ABC News) While the situation is undeniably sad, and it could be argued that T-Mobile should have been more proactive in warning about voicemail long-term storage risks, not a single story I've seen on this has pointed out the most obvious "teaching moment" fact of all. It is *your* responsible to backup voicemail messages that you really want to save. I've been doing this since I was a teenager with my first homemade answering machines. If someone left me a funny message I wanted to preserve (yeah, my friends were an odd bunch) I'd copy it off to a cassette so there was no chance of it being accidentally erased on the answering machine itself. Many voicemail systems now allow you to download voicemail to mp3 files. Absent that, you can buy a cheap tape recorder or digital recorder -- and a handset intercept or suction cup induction pickup -- for playing the messages and saving them to your local device. In a pinch you can even use a microphone against the earpiece, though audio quality will suffer in that case. Everything you need is at Radio Shack. It is unfortunate that the mainstream media stories about this case appear to have missed or ignored this important lesson. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org Founder: - Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad