Daily Mail to launch bespoke text service

Dear Sir, I must complain...

The Daily Mail could be about to hurl a few boulders within the confines of its own glass house by introducing a new service called MailTXT.

The new service, as the name implies, is a bespoke text service available to Daily Mail readers. Users who sign up to it will be able to text other MailTXT subscribers for free from anywhere in the world, with non-MailTXT bound texts charged at a rate of five pence per text.

Hold on a second, surely this can’t be the same Daily Mail that prides itself on acting as the bastion for the protection of proper English can it? The same Daily Mail that has been known to castigate avid texers in the past as destroyers of the English language? And the very same paper that once reported how regular users of text messages “suffer a greater loss of IQ than [someone] smoking marijuana”?

Yup, the same one. Even more sinister though is how the Mail intends to use the information it collects from users of the service. As Guy Zitter, managing director at the Daily Mail, explains: "Aside from giving our readers a vital money-saving service, MailTXT provides us with the platform to find out more about them, so we can continue to deliver the kind of quality content and products that appeal to them most.”

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