David Pogue - Consumer Advocacy

Consumer Advocacy

In his columns and blog posts in The New York Times, Pogue has launched several high-profile consumer advocacy initiatives. His campaigns have caused corporations to change practices and marketing claims that Pogue said were unfair or misleading.

In July 2009, Pogue launched "Take Back the Beep." The campaign was designed to raise consumer awareness about American cellphone carriers’ mandatory 15-second voice mail instructions. Pogue wrote that the instructions are unnecessary, as most everyone knows "what to do at the beep."" However, because consumers can’t easily turn the instructions off (if at all), the instructions eat into consumers’ voice plan minutes. "I calculated that if Verizon’s 87 million customers leave or check messages twice each business day, that comes out to $750 million of air time a year — your money and your time, listening to pointless instructions over and over again."

Pogue explained how consumers could bypass the voice mail instructions, encouraged readers to complain about the practice to their carriers, and provided links where they could file complaints. Other media outlets reported on the "Take Back the Beep" campaign, including radio stations and blogs such as Gizmodo, Engadget, The Consumerist, and Technologizer. As a result of the "Take Back the Beep" campaign, AT&T shortened its voicemail instructions to eight seconds down from 12 or 15, though no other carriers followed suit and Verizon Wireless didn’t respond to the campaign.

In November 2009, Pogue reported on a Verizon customer’s complaint that the wireless carrier charged $1.99 a pop for "bogus data downloads," a practice validated by another reader who said he works for Verizon. The charge resulted whenever a Verizon customer touched the up-arrow key on some Verizon phones. The key is easy to accidentally hit and is preprogrammed by Verizon to launch the mobile Web, causing the consumer to incur a $1.99 data charge each time the key is pressed.

As a result of Pogue’s reportage, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked Verizon to explain the data charge. In October 2010, in response to the FCC inquiry, Verizon agreed to pay up to $90 million in refunds to 15 million customers "wrongly charged for data sessions or Internet use,"" one of the largest refunds by a telecommunications company.

In January 2010, Pogue reported that Barnes & Noble claimed its Nook e-reader weighed 11.2 ounces, though Pogue found it weighed 12.1 ounces. He wrote that the discrepancy was "a rather important fib in a product that you have to hold in your hand for hours at a time." Barnes & Noble claimed that "higher than anticipated demand" for the Nook created "minor variances in the manufacturing process" resulting in a "marginal weight difference…making Nook 12.1 ounces." The company said it would update all references to the weight.

Pogue took Barnes & Noble to task again in November 2011 for claiming that its Nook Color Tablet allowed users to view movies and TV shows in high definition. However, the device’s screen resolution is 1,024 x 600 pixels, below the lowest-quality HD format of 720p, which has a screen resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels. In response, Barnes & Noble agreed that consumers might be misled by the HD video claims and eliminated nine such references from its Web site and from its marketing literature.