One of the largest premium mobile content distributors, Jamba (or Jamster in UK and US) is going forward with their Guardian program by launching Finnish version of Guardian. Jamba Guardians principle is simple – parents can prevent their children from ordering Jamba premium services and thus take control of their phone bills. The Guardian program was launched way back in September 2005 and it’s still under progress in many European countries. Guardian is a good idea, but…

Screenshot below tells what is wrong. Guardian is linked only in page footer, using small print. Nasty practise… Just to make things fair and straight, some of the Jamba /Jamster International sites (like UK and US) promote Guardian properly in their main menu. Finland’s case is sadly not the only one, because for example the German version also follows the small print practise. The question is why hide it like this?

To make things even worse (at least in my eyes), Jamba / Jamster is a subsidiary of VeriSign - possibly one of the most trusted and largest corporations in the telecoms business. This kind of behaviour is very far from the public image they try to create, and I seriously hope that entire smallprint Guardian is a mixup.