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U.S. National Do-Not-Call Registry On the Way?
WinkyN writes "Yay! The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a measure that creates a national "do not call" list for telemarketers. Telemarketers are required to check the list every three months and can be fined up to $11,000 each time they violate the law. Now I won't have to ignore my telephone when it rings since more than 50 percent of my calls are from telemarketers." Congress is just getting around to passing a budget bill to run the government for fiscal year 2003 (started last October), and we're now in the time period when everything and the kitchen sink gets thrown into it just before it passes. Good to know that there's at least one useful piece of legislation.
My guess is that someone has a change of heart at the last minute that just happens to coincide with a large increase in their bank ballance. This will never go into effect.
I don't think its the job or responsibility of the federal government to dictate whom businesses may or may not call.
There are already exemptions for political parties, charities, and businesses you have a preexisting relationship with. I believe businesses can contact you if you've done business with them within so many months/years or if you're currently doing business with them.
Unlike spammers, each telemarketer can only hit one 'victim' at a time,
I guess you've never heard of the predictive dialer? Using this device, a single telemarketer can annoy many people simultanously, because it places many calls at once. The first person to pick up will get to speak to the telemarketer, and the rest will be wondering why their line is dead. A complete waste of their time.
they are not anonymous (they can't withhold their number)
I have yet to receive a telemarketing call that shows a valid number on the caller id. If that's not what you mean by withholding their number, I'd love to know how to get their contact information.
and will more often than not leave you alone if you say "I'm sorry, but you are wasting your time. Please remove me from your list."
I played that game for a time, the calls stopped for awhile but after a few months they started picking up again. Nowadays, even if I pick up the phone to tell them, I just get a dead line because of their damn predictive dialers. This is the last straw. They telemarketers have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted to self regulate. It's high time for a national do-not call list.
That's unlikely. For spam, since many admins in the Orient don't seem to give a damn about who they're relaying e-mail for, and since they don't (can't, really, as long as they relay blindly) charge money for this, spammers use 'em.
Free phone relays, however, don't exist as far as I know. International calls (a) mostly require somebody to actually BE there, and (b) cost a non-trivial amount of money, normally.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Uhm, this wont be abused! How about this example: I buy something from Hotmail, thus prior business is established. Suddenly, NBC, Comcast, and every other little thing MS has itself dug into starts calling me. Ick ick ick.. I don't like it.
Or is their a check in place to stop this from happening?
Can all fish swim?
Is it really?
Granted now to sell your product you can now call thousands of people in the country and you can send millions of spam to the world at large. Granted that this is very efficient as one person can send off several thousands of E-Mails with a single click or can make hundreds of calls in a day's time thanks to the new computerized dialer systems.
But is it really worth it to the company? Or is it efficiency at the cost of bad consumer feeling?
I'm betting on the latter.
Take X-10.com and thier products. When I forst heard of them and their home automation equipment I was interested. When I learned that it could work under Linux I was thinking of the major geek factor there. I had an old touch screen pentium wall mount case that I could have made the heart of the system in nothing flat. I was really seriously considering doing my house up into my own little nerdvana.
Then the spam came.
All I ever got was pop-ups everywhere I went and the only way to get rid of them was to go to their site and beg to be left alone for 30 days...one lousy month. And the quality of the ads were starting to get offensive. Scantily clad women in ads that implied (if not flat out said) "Use this camera to spy on people".
Not "Use this camera for security" or "This product will let you monitor yout infant child from anywhere in the house" or even "Use our products to make toast in the kitchen with a command from the bathroom". No, it was and still is the semi-nekkid women and the implication that you too can become a high tech peeping tom.
After a steady barage of that message I decided to spend my money on getting a home theatre system instead. They cost themselves a customer and perhaps more than just I with all the others whom I've talked to who feel the same way.
Telemarketers are the same way. I don't want to have to be reminded that I'm going to die in 50 years by some guy from a funeral parlor. I don't want to be bothered during dinner by my long distance carrier asking if I want to switch to them (do they NOT check to make sure that I'm not already a customer first?)
Something like this would be a godsend enabling me to be able to spend time with my family and friends in peace. It'd be an ever greater godsend if they could get rid of those stupid "International Drivers License" spams I get 100 times a day as well.
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
How is that any different than making a store buy a liquor permit? Some can afford it more easily than others - how is that unconstitutional?
Karma: Professionally Doomed (mostly affected by inability to keep opinions to self)