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National Do Not Call List Opens for Registrations

Posted by michael on from the ring-ring dept.

prockcore writes "The National Do Not Call Registry is up and running. Sign up so most telemarketers cannot call you starting October 1st. There are exemptions though, like for charities and political organizations." Note that many of the states which have opened their own registries will be sharing that data with the national list, so you may not have to re-register - check and see what your state is doing.

6 of 599 comments (clear)

  1. Needs email address to register... by sdo1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not particularly pleased that the US government now has a growing database tying email addresses to phone numbers.

    (for those that didn't bother to read it, they require a valid email address to register your phone number online)

    I guess I'll be creating a throw-away yahoo or hotmail address for this...

    -S

    --
    --- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
    1. Re:Needs email address to register... by squarefish · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think you're a little paranoid about the wrong things. What will the email do for them that the other info they obtain by your phone # doesn't? Chances are that by just supplying your phone # and prior to that they already know where you live, work, eat and sleep. Do you really think they haven't already tied your internet use to your phone/ip/address if they really wanted too?

      even though we generally don't have any privacy and our civil liberties are slowly being axed by the current administration- at least we can have sex any way we want now

      not for the super rightwingers: this is good for everyone.

      --
      Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
  2. Too bad... by nhaze · · Score: 4, Interesting

    this doesn't affect market researchers calling you. Don't get me wrong i'm not complaining, but it would be great if we could somehow get them under the umbrella.

  3. If charities are exempt by pulse2600 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can't wait to see companies buying time on charity organization's phone calls. Imagine this:

    1) Company makes donation to charity
    2) Charity promises to advertise company during charity's fund raising calls
    3) Company claims donation on their taxes
    4) ????
    5) Profit!!! (or in the case of the charity: Non-Profit!!!!!)

  4. Re:Yes... by dave-tx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm hoping this will work better than the do-not-call list in Texas. Maybe other Texans have had better luck, but I'm still swamped with calls that fall under the "legal" umbrella (such as shady real estate dealings that somehow claim they fall under the non-profit clause). Hey, at least the national list doesn't make you fork out a couple bucks to sign up, unlike the Texas list.

    --

    >> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"

  5. Resist temptation to flood the list, please by unfortunateson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just had another thought.

    Some enterprising young /.er is probably thinking right now that it's less than ten billion total phone numbers (by the time you screen out non-US area codes, toll-free and service numbers it's probably on the order of 6 or 7 billion), a bunch of random domains and e-mails can be created to add EVERY SINGLE phone number to the list, and even automate the e-mail reply with a procmail line. (Actually, since business phone numbers aren't covered by the DNC list, it's probably less than 3 billion possible numbers.)

    Don't.

    No, really.

    If the registry is a complete set of the US phone system, some telemarketer will sue claiming that there's false data in there, and that the majority of the people on the list never opted out.

    They'll have to scrap the whole thing, and start over again with an even-more-invasive registration procedure.

    --
    Design for Use, not Construction!