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FCC Allows Bells to Sell Your Telephone Usage Data
Devistater writes "Spotted on hardocp. The FCC said in a ruling yesterday that telephone companies can sell your name, who you call, and for how long you talk to anyone who is an "affiliate." No longer is this required to be an opt in marketing approach, now its OPT OUT. Sounds like spam is coming to the telephone world, and what an egregious breach of privacy. Article on PCWorld has some of the details." There's also a short Reuters story and a good one on ecommercetimes.com.
The Bells would love for you to be on tons of those obnoxious calling lists. Not only do they make money from selling your name and phone number, I'm sure it also increases their rate of sales for those extra options to block telemarketers. Sounds like a win-win for the bells.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
how much are they expecting to charge me now to "opt out" of this? I already pay a couple of bucks a month for the "privilege" of having an unlisted number.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
What a moron. I guess I should have a reduced expectation of privacy in the bathroom if it is in regards to the brand of toilet paper I use, or my preferred bar soap.
I can't believe he thinks anyone will buy this aas anything but a cop out to corporate "donations". Too bad no one gives a damn.
argh. Time to call the phone company and sit on hold for a million years...
----rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Well, yes and no.
1) You have to decide if their violating your privacy constitutes harming you. I think it does. So, just like drug makers can't sell you poison (doing you harm,) the phone company can't sell your phone records to people who want information on you. The harm is, I will grant, less severe, but it is still harm.
2) The guv'mint provides a regulatory backdrop that makes the telephone system possible. The system was built by Bell, originally, but with government help. If there were really more than one system - if, say, Sprint and AT&T customers could not call each other - than you might expect less guarantees about their behavior. As it is, they are selling access to the single, public, telephone network. They should not be in a position to dictate the terms under which that network can be accessed.
3) In the past, your phone records have been more-or-less private. This is a PRECEDENT. Precedent is more powerful than logic; if you engage in an illogical business practice long enough that people expect you to do it, you can't stop. Unfortunately, this principle has no force of written law, but as a practical guideline it pops up all the time.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I would hate to think of the that anytime you purchase a good or service, that your personal information will be sold to spam houses.
The whole concept of advertising right now is getting absolutely ridiculous. It seems now that the onus is on us as consumers to pay attention to all advertisments, rather than the advertising to attract us by being clever, funny what have you. Simply by being a possible consumer, the advertiser somehow got the right to harrass me.
What's the point of having a telephone, if I am going to be getting the ringing equivalent of pop-up windows? It's bad enough with telemarketers.
Screw it, if any one needs to reach me, send me a damn letter (email's worse!), if its important enough for me to know it can wait a week sheesh...
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the kind of information that you needed a warrant to get? How can something that was considered private enough to require a judge's approval now be sold to the highest bidder. I seriously hope that this is not as bad as it sounds. I'm holding off writing my representatives until I see if this is real and if it really says what we're hearing. If the news is as bad as this sounds, WRITE YOUR REPRESNTATIVE!!! Don't let this action go unchallenged.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
It is NOT a free speech issue to tell other divisions, "partners", or anyone at all for that matter who I call. I don't think this you can find a better example of violating a person's right to privacy (4th Amendment) than to sell or otherwise disseminate details about a person's personal phone calls (date, time, number, duration).
This is a clear example of corporate takeover of government. Citizens - you're doing it to yourselves. Take political action; you don't have to quit your job. Just take a few minutes one day a week to contact your representatives to gripe and organize locally, whether you're an independent, a Green, a Republicrat or a Demopublican.
God I hate anyone who says if you dont like something just don't buy it. That works for pizzas (man you'll never see me eat at a Papa Johns) but not GOVERNMENT SANCTIONED MONOPOLIES like telephone services.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
The text of the FCC ruling claims that this opt-out thing was done to balance the "first amendment rights" of the carriers. What about my rights not to be marketed at constantly?
Oh, wait, sorry, my mistake. That right's not explicitly mentioned in the constitution, I must not deserve it.
I'm not a person, I'm but a lowly consumer. I exist to fuel other people's economy. I should just shut up and consume.
We must remember the First Amendment which protects any shrill jackass no matter how self-seeking.
-- F. G. Withington
> You obviously have a very high self-worth to think ...
Nah. What this sounds like is that they'll set up affiliates of all the phone companies and atuomatically get "pen registers" of all call made by everyone. These files will be analyzed by software that looks for interesting patterns. The customers that the software flags as "interesting" will then be examined in more detail.
All of it legal; all without any pesky court orders.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I've found a method that's a bit more effective. Tell them, "please remove me from your list" before they can stammer out their opening stanza. They're legally obligated to cut you from the list, and they can't make more money off your number by selling it. (at least I hope that's the way it works).
Either way, I've noticed significantly less telemarketing calls since I started doing this.
- passion
i'm so sick of all you sanctimonious fucks saying 'well boycott it then'. HOW THE HELL are you going to boycott phones? oh, wait a minute..... let me guess, nobody calls you anyway, right? you cannot boycott phones.
let me make this clear. your boycott of the RIAA did NOTHING. your boycott of the MPAA did NOTHING. your boycott of the phone companies will do NOTHING. deal with it.
OR, don't have an affair! be honest! if you are so conserned about being caught doing something wrong... either don't do it... or take extra good care and not getting caught. Don't ask the govm't to cover your tracks for you.
Agreed. I'm reminded of that classic SNL sketch "We're the PHONE company, we don't have to care."
Free market zealots crack me up, because their philosophy is based on the mistaken idea that free markets even exist.
In the ideal free market, I want to do task X, company A produces widget A to do task X, company B produces widget B to do task X, company C etc. etc. etc. If one company bothers me, overcharges me, abuses my privacy etc. I just take my business elsewhere. This is a fine model for TVs, cars, etc. etc. but there are many sectors of the economy where this is an entirely false model.
As a most eggregious example, take the California energy crisis. People (or perhaps, if you're bitter politicians paid off by energy companies) were fed up with the innefficiency of the California public utilities. So they privatized the whole thing. Theoretically this was supposed to create a handful of competing companies all trying to undercut each other to provide service X (here, electricity) to as many people as possible. This didn't happen. They got together and fixed prices and engineered a shortage to create demand. Blackouts started, and people's power bills went up. Enron had a big hand in this. Someone tell me, at any point in that company's entire history did they do anything that helped anyone other than a small group of principle shareholders?
The record industry works in the same way. Label A and label B don't compete with each other for customers. They have carefully carved out territories and their prices are fixed by a trade organization (RIAA)
I used to really believe in total free-market capitalism, it's a beautiful theory. But like communism, it fails miserably in practice. You need a strong regulatory government to preserve free trade and competition, because the market naturally tends toward consolidation. Unfortunately, we don't have that. We have a strong government that is more often than not, working to HELP the price fixers and tycoons. There are times when I think our current system is actually worse than total deregulation.
Wow... that went on for too long.
Anyway, back to phone companies. These are companies operating in a government sanctioned monopoly (as the parent post mentioned) in such situations, I think nationalization is the only intellegent way to go, since there is at least some accountability. Wheras in a monopoly, people have no option other than to do without a needed public service. We should have had nationalized railroads years ago, as well, but the democratic party was too addicted to the money that labor unions gave them to support trucks on interstates to bother with it.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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This is a reply to this comment as a bunch of the other ones.
I imagine many of the slashdotters (and many techie non-slashdotters) out there work at these Bells and all these other companies engaging in these violations of civil liberties. Wouldn't the first place to initiate change be within the corporate walls? For all of you who work at companies selling information and using technology to facilitate the exchange, why not stand up and refuse to comply with corporate wishes until the issues of civil liberties are brought up and resolved? Of course, that may mean your job, but there are lots of jobs out there and lots of ways to make money without infringing on others privacy.
These "selling of information" activities cannot happen if there aren't people willing to build the technology to let the sales, marketing and boardrooms do whatever they want to make money. With all the news lately about corporate crooks, I'd think eventually the people that work at these companies would realize they do have power to change things. It's a matter of courage.
There's no way we can expect most lawmakers and CEOs to change what's happening (even though they should change it!). They are already protected from civil liberty violations. They have goons working to protect what they do and how they do it. Writing them/counting on them may help but in the end most of them have no idea what's involved with all the new technology and new culture surrounding that technology -- and certainly they won't be able to adjust the laws based on a few angry customers.
I guess the crux of my point is that there are a lot of techies out there enabling these activities. The RIAA must have techies working for them, so do the Bells, and so did Enron, on and on. Why did these techies build this stuff that let this happen? If you are one of the techies at these companies, speak up and tell us your reasoning why you build and maintain solutions that let people so easily violate our civil rights?
Are you really this stupid? The reason why they don't stand up and speak out is because they'll be fired and replaced with more complacent techies. Its not like these "employees" have any bargaining power anymore. The dot.com rush is over. A techie is just another worker these days. And in this economy they're also a dime a dozen.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Hmmm... I do appreciate your frankness. My viewpoint is not a matter of ignorance or stupidity but one of frustration.
Your right in some respects, the individual bargaining power era is over, if it ever existed in the first place. However, that wasn't exactly my argument. Instead, I suggested as a TECHNICAL COMMUNITY why do WE continue to PERPETUATE practices we don't agree with? Furthermore, we all understand that paying the bills is sometimes more important than righting the wrongs of corporations, yet our dialogues on Slashdot, in the breakroom, at the bars, and in our living rooms suggest that we care deeply about protecting our civil liberties. If we care so deeply, why do we enable the corporations we work for, build technology for, and buy services from to abuse this technology and our supposedly "down" economy by selling our information?
The "dot com rush is over"/"we're all commidities" is not a good reason to avoid ACTION, it's merely an excuse. And, you're right, techies are a dime a dozen -- well, at least, the ones that hole up and pretend that they are victims and not volunteers.
I've found a method that's a bit more effective. Tell them, "please remove me from your list" before they can stammer out their opening stanza. They're legally obligated to cut you from the list, and they can't make more money off your number by selling it. (at least I hope that's the way it works).
No, the correct thing to say is, "Please ADD me to your Do Not Call list." Removing you from one list doesn't mean you won't appear on another list, but if you're on the Do Not Call list, you should not get another call from the SAME COMPANY. Note that the person calling probably doesn't actually work for the company they're representing; telemarketing is outsourced, and the DNC list probably applies to the telemarketing company rather than the company who wants you to buy stuff, so you may continue to get calls from other telemarketing companies on behalf of the same company, but not from the same telemarketing company again. That may vary somewhat.
Your state may also have a state-wide Do Not Call list; mine does.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I don't think I'm "deluded" in the slightest when I see all of the efforts made by the FBI over the years to obtain more flexibility in performing surveilance.
Technically, no, maybe they'll always want a warrant first - but they're also constantly trying to make sure getting that warrant is a "no-brainer". Ideally, they'd like a search warrant to be handed out like a piece of candy. It's simply a piece of paper that makes their activity look more legitimate on the surface.
It's not that the FBI loves collecting "evidence they could never hope to use". The problem is, technology makes it feasible to process much more raw information than ever before. If they can side-step traditional limitations on what they can and can't collect as evidence, they can start mass collection efforts, fed into computer systems, and have the machines do the work for them. Flag all the "interesting" stuff that pops up, get your warrant, and go check it out.
How hard is it for them to claim they "acted in good faith" when their expensive software "data mining" package said someone needed to be checked out? Nevermind they kicked in some gun dealer's door at 2AM and gave his wife a heart-attack, all because the software couldn't tell those large gun purchases were just inventory for his store - as opposed to "suspected terrorist activity".
I'd be more concerned if right-to-lifers bought an abortion clinic's calling information. Forget loss of money or privacy - how about bombing or lynching?
There's also the issue of them knowing the names of people you call now. Think about it - they know your friends names now. Imagine the junkmail they could send. The sort of social engineering we normally only see in E-Mail viruses suddenly becomes much more powerful and much more personal. They can no longer just ape your on-line life to trick you - they can ape your actual real life - you can get a snail-mail from a friend you know saying how your other friend struck it rich doing X. It is, of course a scam - but it grossly increases the maximum IQ to fall for it.