This is easy. Add "No Thanks!" button and change "Done" to "Subscribe"

You, Quim, Ari, Peter, anyone who gets paid by Nokia and is known to this community.

Cool. Now there's more useful information in this 1 sentence than in the boring and unsubstantial mail that opened this thread.

What may be difficult to understand when you're there (right in these hallways and meeting rooms) is how disheartening the silence outside is. Nokia is the master of silence. Nokia hardly ever communicates. This issue was first raised on may 25th, and I'd have expected some sort of public statement within one week. (A public statement could be: "Not that big of a deal."; it needn't be an apology or a promise to change things.) Just anything.

Then we had blog posts, bug reports, private mails to people @nokia... still nothing. Silence.

Knowing that somebody talks about it, that we're being heard (which is what I'd like to read into your lines), is very important. Even if you can't say what you're discussing etc. - just the simple fact that you're discussing, that somebody's still alive in the ivory tower, is good to know. That should have been Nokia's statement here in the community forum in May: "We hear you. We're discussing internally, too."

Saying "I hear you and I know very well what you mean" would be just cool. No need to disclose internals.

First: I have to repeat what Texrat said before. Some Nokians might try a customers hat once in a while.

Other than that, you'd be surprised how often I find myself wearing Nokia's hat. I think everybody working in a big company understands a lot of what might possibly be going on at Nokia's offices. But with MyNokia I really don't understand what it's good for.

Here's my hat, ragnar. Wear it:

I registered at Ovi a while ago, before I got my N900. When I bought the N900, of course I started using Ovi from this device, too. Nokia knows my name, my credit card #, knows which devices I own and use actively (I buy from the store for both devices), has a valid mail address and phone number.

Enter MyNokia. The N900 sends an SMS (including information I don't know). What could you now know that you couldn't have gathered from the whole Ovi-infrastructure?

Talking about win-win: What do I get in return? They promised information about my device. Wrong. I got 2 or three messages since I registered, saying that new software was available. There was no new software. The messages directed me to a website "for further information" which didn't exist but returned a 404-error.

Now what do I do? I search for My Nokia on the web to change my settings there. I'm taken to a site where I can login with my Ovi account. Guess what happens then? Tis site asks me to sign up to My Nokia even though the N900 already registered me there! You, Nokia, have me registered at MyNokia but don't know it when I go there with my existing account! WTF? What kind of "data" do you collect? Can't you match my existing Ovi account with the automatic MyNokia registration? What's it good for then?

I really cannot see the point. Do you want to collect random data? That's probably really close to being illegal in some countries. Do you want users to sign up to your (Ovi) services? That's great, make them do so, but MyNokia will not achieve that. How does a MyNokia SMS make me a paying Ovi Store customer (if I'm not already)? It doesn't. I'd need username, password, a credit card, mail address,...... So what's the point?

Whatever you want to learn about you customers.... make them tell you. Make them fill in all the forms you need and sign up for everything you want them to by offering, say, a basic set of applications for free in return. Like Bounce Evolution and such. Have it all in the main menu (like it is), but only start a download helper application when they're first launched (like you already do) and have the user agree to transmit all the data you need. And sign up to Ovi. And agree to give you their first born.

EDIT: I forgot the important part: Given how MyNokia does not tie the user to any of Nokias online services... How useless it is from a consumer's perspective... How little information it should be able to collect... Is it worth destroying the good, open, "no-kill-switch", "you-own-your-device" image that Maemo/MeeGo could have had as a USP?

I would definitely not reply with a "Screw you - law is on our side" mail to my paying customers.

I'm not sure how ANY company would think that customers could ever consider an obfuscated, subject to charge, unsolicited SMS a feature - but that WOULD have been okay, since all of us know that sometimes stupid ideas get delivered out there without a second thought on how this might come off to the customers.

There would have been a dozen ways to deal with this after the first outcries from the community. After all, the sending of the SMS itself wasn't the big fiasco in this, it was the reaction to the inquiries of the community.

First a month of SILENCE, and after that a slap in the face in form of an official reply. Other PR departments would have received a collective dismissal by now.

This just proves once again that your higher-ups don't care about PR - seems like they still stake everything on the "For every customer with alienate, we'll get a new one by releasing a new flashy, half finished device" model.

Both in the old threads and in here lots and LOTS of suggestions have been made. Suggestions that would have lead to a real win-win situation, instead of the Noki wins - customer loses to legal department situation we now have.

Imagine MyNokia would have been a voluntary, send-by-net thing to begin with. Further imagine it would have been a real service instead of providing old news with non-working links. And then imagine that all information collected would not have been given away to "Nokia partners" without our consent.

Don't you think in that case most of us would have willingly subscribed to the service? Don't you think this wouldn't just have been a signal in the right direction ("Look, we provide you with a free service, and all you have to do is to fill in this form online"), but would also have been more effective than trying to do it secretly (which, ultimately, now leads to people installing the NotMyNokia application and you losing a lof of that oh-so-precious information)?

For me, the solution would be something like Mer, with working drivers for all hardware before the end of 2010. I do not know if this would require nothing from Nokia or far more than they are willing to consider.

By Mer, I mean basically open source OS with the interface to any binary blobs that can't be avoided documented.

I did not attach conditions on how to use my money and I do not spy on them. I expect to be able to use my device as I see fit and not be spied on or pay for "services" I do not need and do not want.

This accurately describes me right now. I was responsible for a lot of people around me buying N800's and I am now responsible for them moving off of them and onto Android devices lately because I can't, in good conscience, recommend a Nokia N900 as either a good phone nor even as a good portable computing platform (certainly not as a phone, God no!). We've spoken with our dollars. Nokia continues not to listen. Fine by me, I guess. I'm just disappointed at the wasted opportunity that Nokia had to create something far better than anyone else. Instead, people within Nokia with the positions to make decisions have instead chosen to piss all over the customers and their brand, and communicate in what I've already called a passive-aggressive manner. Canned phrases like "we value your opinion" are insulting when the meaning of these phrases is clearly not in evidence.

This is why we choose to take our business elsewhere these days.

IANAL - but I wonder if this might also fall under the wire fraud laws regarding using resources that people have to pay for in a way that customers are neither aware of or have no control over. i.e. calling FAX machines on business lines to spam ads--illegal because business lines usually incur an uncontrollable cost to the recipient of said ads. Another is telemarketing calls to mobile phones since there are many people who must pay for such unwelcomed calls, incurring an uncontrolled cost.

Agreed! First--what makes them think that anything we, or any of the community of coders that wrote all of the software that they're using to base their operating system on, would appreciate the surreptitious behavior of dipping into our computers to gather information about us? And not even have the courtesy to even tell us, too! Think about all the GNU software they're using and think about the intent of the rights they're being given. This is appalling, irresponsible and flatly unacceptable.

gerbick asked for a solution. For me, the starting point (and I know the dead horse is wearing thin) is for whoever speaks to the community, in whatever role or context, to quit with the automatic, insensitive, unthinking, defensive canned responses.

Cripes that's gotten old.

If any corporate representative could just do that, it would be a huge start toward repairing damaged goodwill.

It's not a question of "if", Nokia. JUST DO IT.

Here's a ponderer:

If a 3rd party app would do this and have been submitted to -devel, how far do you think it would have made it? How does this match against the standards held over everyone else?

Even if they said the right thing in a rude way, and DID the right thing, it would be better than saying the wrong thing in a nice way, and doing nothing (as is the case now).

If they came out today and said, "Fine--we're opening up 100% of the source code you a***holes wanted." I'd actually cheer and even consider buying their new crap. :P Hell, Despair Inc. talks to its customers like that all the time and I continue to buy their crap.

Really? Android is your answer for a more open, more customer friendly and generally less evil platform?

Nokia does many things we may not like, unfortunately Maemo is still the best we've got in the market as far as open values and freedom goes. . . .

Really? You would recommend the N900 as a phone? I didn't see any mention of open, customer friendly or evil in the grandparent post. I think that you would be hard-pushed to argue that Nokia are customer-friendly.