Do-Not-Call List Could Be Opened For Phone Spam

Wick_7654 submits a link to this story at the Chicago Sun-Times, which begins "The agency overseeing the national Do Not Call Registry is considering opening a loophole to allow companies to deliver 'pre-recorded message telemarketing.' The effort is being organized by Allen Hile of the FTC's division of marketing practice. Be sure to let the FTC know how you feel about it." The proposed change specifies that recorded calls would be allowed only when an "established business relationship" exists, but provisions like that tend to be stretched to absurdity.

Comments

Screening technology is pretty good...

[Sheetrock]

Look for one of those Caller ID units that do text-to-speech on the number. During the calls leading up to the election I don't think we answered one of them, just let them go to the answering machine and dumped them. Would be nice if they wiped out all telemarketing altogether but it'd probably be deemed unconstitutional because of the free speech issues.

If things get really bad, just switch to cellphones. They can't call those, although for some reason they get a lot of wrong numbers.

Re:How is this different?

[Edward Teach]

This would allow a third party to make the call for a business. Yeah, then they sell your number to a bunch of other businesses. And, since they were allowed to call, now those other businesses can call. And then, they sell your number to even more businesses...get it?

Re:How is this different?

[Reziac]

What I wrote on the comments form; feel free to plagiarize:

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This is the worst of all possible amendments. Automated phone spam is already the most abusive, as it usually grabs the phone line and won't let go until it's done with its spiel. This wastes my time if I happen to answer the line, and wastes the limited space on my answering machine tape if it picks up. Plus in my experience, automated phone spam is the MOST likely to not have a valid way to get off the list. Oh, sure, it may give you an 800 number to call, but that's likely to reach some convoluted voicemail system that never gets you anywhere. And the concept of "prior contact" has already been stretched to mean "and everyone our company ever shares marketing information with". Not only that, but the upshot WILL be that telemarketers uniformly go to an automated model (much cheaper for them, much more annoying for us). PLEASE don't let this go through. KEEP "Do Not Call" a REAL prohibition against junk calls.
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