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U.S. National Do-Not-Call Registry is Law
extra88 writes "Bush has signed the
Do-Not-Call Registry into law. The registry will be run by the FTC and funded by fees collected from telemarketers. Telemarketers can be fined up to $11K for calling someone on the list. Politicians, surveys (loophole?) and charities are exempt from using the list. The FCC oversees certain industries (airlines, banks and phone companies) and will have to "buy in" to the registry for it to affect those industries. Slashdot covered this story when the bill went through House of Representatives."
My first thought was that this list could cut down my telemarketing calls received by about 90%. But what is that you say? It may not apply to phone companies? Well, I suppose cutting my telemarketing calls received by 5% is still some sort of progress.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
I have gotten some thinly veiled "research survey" calls, which offer a free sample of a product as the compensation for participating.
I used to work for a legitimate marketing research firm (in Canada). Occasionally, we would offer free products as an incentive to complete the survey. These were legitimate offers (one-use phone cards, etc).
This being said, however, I still agree that it would be possible for someone to abuse this system.
If some company is stupid enough to make an international telemarketing call, have at it. That business model will soon drive them bankrupt.
One of the reasons that we currently get telemarketing calls is the pricing structure of local and toll calls is low enough to support that model. This crap didn't happen back when a phone call actuall cost something.
According to the ftc's website http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/donotcall/ju mp.html
It'll be phased in over 8 weeks region by region starting in July. You can register either by a toll-free call, or online (Yea!).
can be found here http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/donotcall/in dex.html.
[/end whore]
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
First, your testimony is evidence, and that is probably sufficient for most cases. It is ancient technology, examining people as they tell their stories, but it works in most cases.
Second, you can take a photograph of your calling-line display.
Third, if they leave a message on your answering machine, you can take a recording to court.
Fourth, you can keep a log of unwanted calls you receive. This is better than your testimony alone, because it shows you are being careful and are making accurate records.
Fifth, many telemarketing suits involve multiple calls. You can give the judge a list of people you spoke to, on what dates, what you told them, and so on. The combined facts make it very unlikely that the defendant did not call you as you claim, and you only need a preponderance of the evidence to prevail.
Sixth, you can ask your friends and neighbors if they received similar calls. Any telemarketer violating the do-not-call list is calling everyone, so you will find other witnesses to verify your report.
Seventh, if it gets to that point is important enough, you can subpoena their records and so on. But then you are into real discovery and may not be able to use small claims court.
I do work for a company that does market-research. Read the law - there are reasonably strict restrictions on what counts as charities, surveys, etc. I may be in the minority but I have done focus groups and do reply to some surveys if I'm not otherwise occupied (well, I used to - working for a research company disqualifies me for most of the now). I hardly think that sending a FREE product, gift certificate, etc. as a thank-you makes a survey somehow evil. (I should note, we hardly do any call-out work and on the rare occasions we do we adhere strictly to the allowed hours and other restrictions.)
Now, you want to see a loophole - how about the exemption for anyone with whom you have a "business relationship". Bought a widget from me in the last 18 months - I'm exempt. I called you for product info in the last three months - you can feel free to start calling me whether I'm listed or not. Fortunately even in those cases (and I think with charities as well) you can tell that specific business/charity to stop calling and they must honor it.
Better still, they must start transmitting caller ID info - no more "ID unavailable" and must have a person on the line within 2 seconds of your answer (the telemarketers hate this since they can't cram in as many calls per person per hour with their predictive dialers).
The other giant loophole is that there are a variety of exemptions for financial institutions, airlines and telecom companies but it appears from the FTC web site that this could be just procedural in that they are already regulated by other agencies and it just needs some interagency coordination to bring those into the fold as well. Still, those exemptions bear watching. Perhaps someone more familiar than I am with the laws would care to comment.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
The provisions for surveys are meant to prevent the government from fighting itself. The government, at various levels, spends billions of dollars per year funding survey research. My employer (the University of Wisconsin) recieves millions each year from the state alone.
If you feel a survey is not of academic nature then the call is illegitimate (per Wisconsin law) and the caller can still be punished. Since Wisconsin's do-not-call list went into effect at the beginning of this year we have recieved phone calls from various areas of the government ensuring our credibility.
You know how easy it is create a "for profit" charity? I've had the same guy call me once a night (for weeks) during dinner explaining that I give money to some kind of police/fire/IbrokeAnailAnonymous charity. He collects 99% of the money, and donates the rest (gee thanks!). The charity loophole is HUGE.
As nice as it is for a charity to call me begging for money, I'd much rather give the money on my own. Ofcourse...people don't go out of their own way nowadays to do just that.
Colossians 2:8
"Amazing what Republicans not in the pockets of trial lawyers do when they run the show."
5 Republicans voted against, and 2 Democrats did.Look for youself.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
As a sociologist, I really do need to call "random" people, and can't consider a survey consisting only of telephone owning people who are willing to take a survey and who are clueless as to the do-not-call registry a valid sample space... There would be no real way to judge many of the statistics taken for granted these days without the ability to call and survey just about anyone. I would hate to think that all of /. would be excluded form any future informational research (according to the latest figures, 0.1% of the US population works in computing, and all of them at Microsoft).
They don't necessarily have the right to call you out of the blue, but if the information is to be statistically valid that's exactly what they have to do. And it is in the public's interests to have accurate statistics (not that there aren't a lot of rigged polls going on).
As for charities? I'm betting they originally wanted to exclude all "nonprofits," but realized that the ACLU and many other political groups are non-profit but not charities. Hence, gain the support of your friendly local Goodwill and keep your iron grip on politics.
The ______ Agenda
Politicians, surveys (loophole?) and charities are exempt from using the list.
I d=883948. I can't check as I dont have RealPlayer, but if you have it, check it out. You can also order a transcript.
I was listening to NPR months ago, and they went through the guidelines for what constitutes a "survey" and "charity" call. I got the impression they were very well defined.
Looking at the NPR site, I think this may be the article: http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wf
From http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/dncalrt .htm
7. What about telemarketers calling from overseas? Are they covered? Won't you have difficulty enforcing your national "do not call" registry outside the U.S?
Telemarketers calling U.S. consumers are covered, regardless of where they are calling from. Enforcement outside the U.S. is not as easy as it is at home, but it is not unusual for the FTC to take law enforcement action - and to prevail - against telemarketers calling from outside the U.S. Moreover, if a company within the U.S. solicits sales through an overseas professional telemarketer, that U.S. company is liable for any TSR violations of the telemarketer. Initiating enforcement action against such companies is not a problem for the FTC.
A do-not-email registry may be law soon too. Seven states (Maine, New York, South Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona, and Oregon) are currently considering legislation on the issue.
In addition, last Friday Senator Mark Dayton (D-Minn) introduced the "Computer Users' Bill of Rights." Among the bills provisions is a call for the Federal Trade Commission to create a national do-not-email list.
At unspam we've developed technology to help states create secure do-not-email registries and are working with a number of legislators to implement and develop effective enforcement strategies for them. For more information email: dne-slashdot@matthew.unspam.com.
UK's TPS
It actually works very well, and companies DO get into trouble if they violate the policy. It has not hindered tele-marketing at all, except that it has put an end to a lot of silly 'double glazing companies' from misusing the system by making them buy the list (which is quite expensive and must be upgraded frequently).
I am on the list, but most people do not know it exists. I have not recieved any crappy calls since signing on, but still recieve texts as they dont come under the same laws (a recent slashdot story
SMS Story
hints that texts may soon be part of this law, however, which is great!). There is also a snail-mail equivalent. Nice to see the self proclaimed 'free world' catching up with the other side of the pond!
It will not drive them bankrupt, the lower labor costs offset the telephone costs by a huge margin. Most countries minimum wages are low enough that the increase in long distance rates will be out weighed by the savings in human labor.
There are 60 minutes in an hour. Current local/LD rates here (for bulk customers) are somewhere below $0.03 a minute. That adds up to $1.80 an hour + $7.00 for labor. Total hourly cost for telephone + labor is $8.80.
In a third world country, imagine if the telephone cost were $0.08 a minute ($4.08/hr). The labor cost could be as low as $0.50 an hour. Add that up and its way cheaper to operate outside the US.
That is the reason India and the Phillipines have so many call centers. It just makes business sense.
I don't see a reason why these telemarket companies will go under, they'll just move away and call from outside our wonderful country.
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
I got sick and tired of having to explain that I was a survey, not a telemarketer, I would not attempt to sell them anything, I would not use personally identifiable information about them for anything, their data was only to be looked at in large clumps, and I would not have phone sex with them!
As the person who got screamed at and otherwise abused, I would like nothing better than to NOT call people who are going to do that. It wastes their time, and wastes my time, and damages my hearing.
If you sign up for a Do Not Call List and fail to read the documentation closely, you may be under the impression that all mass calls to you are illegal, and no amount of explaination by the front-line flunky, or their manager, or the person at the company's 800 number, is going to convince this person differently, because, dammit, they have the Law on Their Side, and that was Illegal and Immoral and They Oughtta Pay For This... and they wind up wasting more of their time on righteous indignation caused by them not properly understanding the terms of the list than they would by quietly saying, "Put me on your do-not-call list" and hanging up.
I would far rather lose some accuracy in the survey, not call these people, and not waste everyone's time. If you don't want some phone company to call you to ask you if you want their service, you will NOT want the hired representative of that phone company to call you to ask you what you think of that service, another nationally known service, and the third service that you actually use for forty minutes.
I do think that certain surveys, such as the youth antismoking survey I had the pleasure of administering, should be exempt from Do Not Call lists, as those will actually be used to figure out ways that kids can be convinced that not only is smoking bad for their health, they should not try it (at least until they are of legal age).
(Amusingly, one man who happened to be employed by the cigarette company who was in fact sponsoring the study politely refused to have his kids take the survey, as he was afraid it would give him a bad rep with them for working for a cigarette company.)
However, surveys that don't have a purpose as noble as that one, such as a survey on burger preferences, should not be exempted from the national Do Not Call list.
I am in the unfortunate position of working for a sometimes telemarketer which has a close relationship to the DMA (I know, but the market sucks right now), and I've been told by very high up individuals in the company that it is illegal for a telemarketer to call a cell phone. Now, of course I'm taking someone elses word for it, but considering that the company was going to make special provisions in code to avoid making calls to cellphones and the type of company I'm in, I think it's a pretty accurate statement. On a personal note, I've had only a cell phone for about 5 or 6 years and rarely receive telemarking calls, when I do I state that I'm on a cell phone, and the telemarketer immediately and very politely appoligizes and hangs up.
Come on, that is a foolish argument. If you are calling people and asking them "are you willing and able to take the time to take a survey right now?" You are already removing any randomness from your data. First you are only getting those people who OWN phones. You are also only going to get those people who have nothing better to do than talk to you at the instant that you call. As such you will talk to many more jobless people than those who work long hours, many more single people than those watching active small children, etc.
You point out some valid, basic flaws, but any pollster worth his salt is aware of and compensates for them using regression analyis. When the analyzed against known characteristics for the population, the results usually turn out to be very consistent.
Sorry, but if you want truly random data, you'll have to work a lot harder than picking up the nearest phone book to get it.
Yes, the accuracy of surveys can always be improved by casting an ever wider net, but pretty soon you run into the law of diminishing returns. Researchers always have to weigh the level of desired accuracy against the costs of surveying a large population sample. Is an extra significant figure on your stats worth and extra three zero's on your budget?
As for whether the public needs more statistics, I don't think so. According to my calculations, I have actually listened to and understood 0.7% of statistics that are spewed at me daily from the television. Of those 0.01% have proven useful to me in my life.
You're absolutely right on this point. In today's instant news culture we are awash in data but supplied very little actual information. The more we are told the less we know. It doesn't help that all the mainstream "news" sources are really just infotainment advertising tools, subservient to the whims of massive, monolithic media conglomerates.
well, it is funny, but in reality, you have to watch what you say on the phone. If she ever says something that can be interpreted as a yes, then boom, you've just bought whatever they're selling. Even when you are on the phone, be very careful about how you phrase your responses, there are some very, very unscrupulous telesales people out there. (Yes, I am a salesperson. No, I don't call people and bug them.)
The thing is, it's not always illegal to cold call a mobile phone. The law specifically exempts companies with whom you have a prior business relationship. For instance, your mobile provider can call you to try to get you to buy new features.
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.