Lycos Germany is now offering a free short message service (SMS) entirely
financed by advertising.
User registration is not required to use the new feature, and there is no daily limit on the number of messages
sent.
Users can send unlimited SMS messages over the Lycos network to all German
GSM 900 networks, and no further costs are incurred for both sender and
receiver apart from the usual Internet access fees.
The length of the text message is, however, limited to 130 characters. This
is because the advertising message “powered by www.lycos.de” is currently
added to the end of every message. This might be replaced by other
advertising in the future.
Lycos intends to extend the service to include GSM 1800 networks in January.
What remains unclear however, is what happens with the data concerning the
sender and receiver of SMS messages. The user agreement states that “date,
time, contents, IP address and receiver number (…) may be registered and
evaluated” — but the disclaimor did not state the reasons for this evaluation.
from germany.internet.com
