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Do Not Call List Under Attack
smooth wombat writes "Do Not Call. Those words are music to millions of Americans who have signed up for the list so they're not bothered by telemarketers. Not content to let things as they are telemarketers are now lobbying the FCC to have state laws which regulate the practice overturned. In April an ad-hoc group of firms ranging from the Direct Marketing Association to the National Children's Cancer Society filed a joint petition asking the FCC to declare that it has 'exclusive jurisdiction over interstate telemarketing calls.' The issue revolves around some states whose Do Not Call laws are more strict than Federal law and which prohibit telemarketers from calling anyone on a Do Not Call, regardless of an existing business relationship." Update: 07/21 18:42 GMT by Z : Official EPIC page, with contact info and background.
Worse than if the DNC list was never introduced, because now they have all of our numbers!
What part of DO NOT CALL dont they understand? I do not want people calling me trying to sell me stuff.. so DO NOT CALL me! hard to get much simpler.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
I used to care about this, but now not so much. I just got rid of the landline phone. Actually I moved and did not get a landline phone in my new abode. It's illegal for marketing types to call my cellular phone. I win. If you really don't want anyone calling you throw out your busted old landline.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The issue revolves around some states whose Do Not Call laws are more strict than Federal law and which prohibit telemarketers from calling anyone on a Do Not Call, regardless of an existing business relationship.
Wah! I can't bother people and piss them off during dinner, quiet evenings, and fill up their answering machines with partial recordings not knowing how long the machine's message was.
Businesses are busy scrambling to create new and interesting ways to get your phone number so that they, and their subsidiaries and sister companies, can contact you with their telemarketers. Companies telling me that they cannot process an order without my telephone number, companies telling their employees that they must take a telephone number down for pickup orders placed over the phone, and requiring a phone number to ship a package. Most employees are doing their job and refuse you service (which is a company's right to do at any time) but I find it increasingly annoying. I'll do anything to not give out my phone number including asking for a supervisor, giving out a phone number with the area code and all zeroes, or just giving the switch board number out at work.
I really have no sympathy for companies that are crying to the FCC about this. The public had been whining to the FCC for how many years to get telemarketers to stop? They finally did, creating a list that the telemarketers can reference to narrow their endless search of a customer to people that might be interested in their products, and they still complain?
Give me a break and stay off my phone.
"There is no evidence that (a favorable FCC ruling) will lead to large increases in telemarketing calls," he said. He, obviously, does not consider the fact that the large amount of telemarketing calls before the DNC list took effect is evidence that, without a list, that they would once again reach their old levels.
Just what the USA needs. More Federal involvment instead of state by state.
/sarcasm.
I don't CARE if they never call me again, regardless if I have dealt with them in the past. Thats what the DO NOT CALL list is for! I'm sick of getting up in the early early morning to hear a recording about home loans. My aunt and her kids are all in the hospital after getting hit by a drunk driver this week, and I can't just 'unplug the phone'. I bolt out of bed, thinking she's out of surgery or something and it's someone trying to sell me ticket's to the Policemen's Ball.
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My name is Duke, and I'm calling from the Great American Do-Not-Call-List Giveaway to let you know that you're a winner in our one million dollar sweepstakes entry sweepstakes, and are already automatically entered to win! Isn't that great?
On top of that, as one of our lucky winners, you're eligible to recieve outrageous discounts on subscriptions to all your favorite magazines! Exciting, huh? Which magazines do you like to read? Entertainment Weekly? Sports Digest? TV Guide?
Art Schools Dietzilla
This law makes perfect sense being a federal law. Why? Because almost all telemarketing calls are crossing state or possibly national borders. Thus there's a natural complication when you have different laws in different states with different abilities to enforce those laws on others.
Better to have one federal law to simplify things.
And I still wonder, why do those telemarketers want to call me if I'm on this list. Seems like they are being done a service here. I'm not going to buy their crap so no sense wasting time on a call.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The worst thing about an action like this it is CLEARLY against the will of the people. The Do Not Call list is opt-in, it only applies to those who go out of their way to sign up. The only "victims" of something like this are the CORPORATIONS who are being denied the right to directly attack those who don't want to have their houses invaded by direct advertising. The people gain nothing from this sort of action, they only lose out.
How is it possible that a democratic governing body, which is supposed to be looking out for the people, is taking a direct stance against them? Which American citizens are rallying against the DNC list?
Yet more sad evidence that the government is more concerned with corporate interests than those of the people.
I moved and did not get a landline phone in my new abode. It's illegal for marketing types to call my cellular phone
If these bottom-feeders manage to get the DNC laws overturned, what makes you think they won't then start whining^Wlobbying about how unfair it is that they can't call cell phones?
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Yeah, these jackasses think people that don't want to recieve calls selling stuff are potential customers.. they're like the girl that loves the 'bad guy' and figures they'll be the one to change him. Don't want to buy a subscription to Gerbil Enthusiast? You just need the love of a good telemarketer!
wow, that's a really weird analogy. Time for my morning coffee.
Starsucks
The law we need even more than "DO Not Call" is a law which says "You can not sell data about people unless that person gives you consent". There must be a way to opt out of having your information added to a sales list. For example, how can anyone opt out of the bank sales lists? Banks are well known for taking their clients data, and selling that information to credit card companies. Credit card companies use this information to mail solicitations for their services.
Likewise, when I go buy a DVD from a store, why do they need my phone number? They want to sell that information to someone, here is a good lead for a guy who buys DVD's?
The Do Not Call list is a great start, but consumers need more protection from harrasment. We need our information kept confidential. When we do buisness with a company, the company should not be allowed to sneak some fine print in the contract which allows data to be sold. God knows what rights I signed away when I applied for my grocery store shoppers card.
And did anyone here about the lawsuit against the company that made the small gadget you connect to your phone line. When you get a call, the device lets out some small noises. These are noises the phone companies use to signify a line is disconnected. Marketing companies that use computerized auto-dialers recognize these noises and immediatly hang up. The marketing associations sued the company of this product saying it violated the marketing companies first amendment rights.
And while we are making laws protecting consumers, lets do away with the mail in rebate.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
The FCC is NOT a law-making entity.
The FCC has no power to overturn state laws or find them unconstitutional, this is the Supreme Court's job.
The FCC is not the way to go. Lobby Congress.
And watch how they laugh in your face as they think "I don't want these whiny bastards calling me everyday trying to get my money that I just weaseled from the taxpayers."
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The reason, Dr. Disaster, is that incoming phone calls on most landlines in the US are free. Incoming calls on cell phones are, typically, not.
...they're right, there should be a uniform standard: NO ONE should be allowed to call anyone on the Do Not Call list at all.
Re the automated dialing, back when I was a kid and you called a phone # and hung up it was called crank/prank calling and it was a crime. How is their machine dialling different (aside from the fact that kids don't contribute to politicians)?
"DO NOT CALL" do you not understand?
Are these people so F-n brain dead that they can't take a hint? I think the list is way to lame. I think they should have a "will beat your ass if you call" list.
That's right. If you call me to peddle bullshit I will come find you and beat your ass. Now that would be an effective list.
Really, I don't understand why they don't flat out outlaw all telemarketing. It's intrusive and obnoxious at the very least.
the marketing firms will find arguments to postpone laws that make it harder for them to harrass customers. when the do not call list went into law, all the dish and satellite calls stopped comming from new york, and started comming from Canada. who do i sue to stop those calls? do i sue AT&T?
i can appreciate the argument for a federal law regulating telemarketing. but maybe congress should pass a law saying they give states the right to make laws however they see fit.
what is eventually going to happen, is the telemarketing firms will get sophisticated and hire powerful lobby groups. they will donate money to politicians who don't want to regulate telemarketing. and the laws will be reversed. it will be hard to overturn the "do not call" list, but i bet lawmakers could sneak in an exception like "related buisnesses exception", so if you buy a DVD from bestbuy, bestbuy can sell your phone number to columbia house since they sell DVD's too. and i bet the lawmakers will give the law a name that is the exact opposite of what the law does, like "consumer telemarketing protection amendment".
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I'm with you on that, with one caveat:
Get the landline, for 911 only. It is federally mandated to be free. I have the landline with that alone on it. I recently got a phone number on it for DSL, and I'm in the process of working out what I need to do to keep the DSL, but go back to 911-only service. Then I can use my local 911 with asterisk, have a plain old "red phone" for 911-only calls in case asterisk goes down, and I get my DSL service.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
At least my telemarker calls don't read like my inbox. I'd blush every time I picked up the phone if the person on the other end was trying to sell me dick pills.
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I remember a movie with Jim Carrey (he wasn't the main character, tho) about a guy who loved accepting cold calls.
He would receive a call from an insurance salesman, and begin saying yes to most things until they arranged an appointment.
Then, after making him waste 2 or more hours, when the insurance salesman was leaving, he'd say:
"There's one little... problem.
I'D RATHER... BE... DEAD!!!" (Then he shut the door on the poor salesman)
Oh joy. How I loved that moment. I know it's cruel, but it vented my frustration towards spammers and the like.
Can someone start lobbying to make lobbying illegal?
[alk]
I have blown off PBS because of this!
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
I have to work with these lists, because part of my job is to support a telemarketing system. Nobody told me squat about that on the interview, nevertheless here I am. I've been here long enough to see the lists come into being. It's making telemarketing harder, and all that good stuff.
I also have the misfortune to need to telemarket in two states, one of which has it's own state list. As it happens, we only call five small towns in this state. In order to get access to the State's DNC list we have to purchase it for the entire state. To make matters worse, this state has a very different set of rules.
On a federal level, you are allowed to call customers you formerly did business with for 18 months after the termination of the business relationship. Not so in this other state. Apparently you aren't allowed to call even the day after the relationship ends. The federal system actually allows the people who get called some recourse. The state system I have to deal with makes it very clear in their fine print that you are allowed a certain amount of accidental calls. Because you are a paying list subscriber, they actually have a department to handle these situations. If you get caught calling people on the state DNC list, you had better have paid the man or else it's game on for lawsuits. What it ends up being is simply extortion. You want to call people of that state, you buy the list, which costs more annually than the entire federal list, for what that's worth.
I really feel sorry for the people who live in that nameless state, because they are payin a ton of taxes to manage a list system that offers them no protection whatsoever. The federal list is a big pain for telemarketers, but at least it has and element of fairness, and really attempts to protect the people who want not to be called.
I'm not interested in arguing the notion of whether the freedom not to be bothered should trump the freedom to call any phone number you want without fear of prosecution, but for the nerds out there, here's some technical details:
The federal list can be downloaded in it's entirety or in updates by date selected once a day by any business who pays the fee. The list is numbers only, no names at all. The state list I have to work with is available by e-mail or on CD-ROM. I picked e-mail, and the updates are entirely at the discretion of the state. So every month or so, my office e-mail gets choked with the list in several parts, so I had to work a special deal with the MIS guys to get extra space on the server. When I first signed up for it, the state didn't send a file until the next scheduled update, but made it clear that we'd be covered in the event of accidentally calling somebody on the list we didn't have access to! Of course almost everybody in the state list is also on the federal list, so we never got a complaint.
I imagine the only people on that state list that are not on the federal list are people looking to sue somebody. They are out there; we've encountered them before. I'm not a fan of telemarketing and would support it if I didn't have to. The federal list makes sense, and really does eliminate any reason for states to keep their own lists, except that grand-daddy of all reasons for government programs - the pork. It's all about the pork, folks. Always has been; always will be.
I always tell marketers to "hold on" and then I lie the phone down until they hang up. It usually takes about 60 seconds. I figure that if everybody would do that, then it would make the practice unprofitable and they'd stop.
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
Could you state to one of the harrassing business' callers that you have "terminated the business relationship" and have that be enough? How can you create a "do not cross this line", after online purschase for example?
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
The telephone consumer protection act of 1991 explicitly prohibits telemarketing calls to numbers where a charge/expense would be incurred by the owner of the number. This was one of the key points of this act and why it included faxes, since the recipient of the fax would incur an expense.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I used to like the female callers. I'd immediately say they sound really cute, and ask them what they are wearing. Before joining the DNC list, I almost coaxed one into phone sex as she was incredibly bored and the last one in her office for the day. She bailed, though. :-\ Chicken.
Info to try and get out of them
1. Age
2. Name
3. Sex [usually obvious]
4. Location [ask them tough questions about the locale]
Those are the easy ones, here are more fun ones
5. How long and many breaks do they get
6. Salary
7. Benefits
8. When their last holiday was
9. What school they went/go to
10. Whether they think this is a worthwhile job
11. The name of the last person they called
12. The name of the person next to them
13. The first 4 digits of their phone number [home]
and so on...
keep a scorecard handy and see how much you can get.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
My dad was one of the first hundred people on the "list". He poked and chided me, saying, "Boy, I bet you Libertarians are stumped on this one, eh?" (Not Canadian, but he talks like one)
... well, maybe it's not so drastic, anymore.
I truly didn't have an answer for him. That is, until he started getting calls to donate for a firemans' ball in another county (where he once had a speeding ticket). Then it was a policemans' ticket raffle in our county, then there was the half dozen calls for the American Heart Association. I think it was the worst though when the CDC called on a "marketing study". Last but not least, I saw a paper survey from the US Postal service. Call it coincidence.
Ironically, he still gets credit card calls, mostly from Puerto Rico or some other location where I suppose this doesn't apply. He told the last one he was on the do not call list, and the guy promptly took him off.
I asked what the policeman said who called about the raffle, "We don't have a list to take you off of." That was last year.
He got another call from the same officer last week. It's a small county/town too, so there really is no excusing it. He told me (over the phone) he was just going to buy a cell for my youngest sister and remove the phone.
I told him he'd lose Internet, but he said the phone line would still be there, just not the phone.
I guess drastic times call for
NYTimes: Sir, are you interested in a 12-month subscription to NY Times? Seinfeld: YES!!! (and slams down the phone)
We were told to keep the customer on the line, interacting for as long as possible. If they were not interested, we were supposed to weasel more 'leads' out of them; meaning we asked them for the names/phone numbers of their friends that might be interested. This constitutes a business-relationship which we could exploit.
Another business-relationship was when we'd call everyone within 20-25 miles of our recent customer. The sales pitch went like:
Hello, this is X calling from Y. Your neighbor, Z, living at Z has recently purchased our product and since we're in the area, we're offering special discounts....
We'd use their address and names to get their neighbors to start listening to us.
When we got somebody that was obnoxious, or just didnt like that we disturbed them, we'd often set them up to be called back in the next few hours. Asking for a supervisor most often yields a hang-up as well. What we were supposed to do is fill out a form stating that the customer didnt want to be called back but since it takes a second to press the 'next' button and a lot longer to fill out a form, virtually nobody was taken off.
Actually, even then I dont think it was possible to permanently remove yourself from our list - even with the form you'd get maybe a few months of respite but after a while, all these forms were just added back to our database. Although this was before the DNR, I cant imagine anything's changed.
Yes, tis true. We are the future!
because when the telemarketers called I'd simply say "Hold on just one second... someone's at the door. Then set the phone on the table for 5-10 minutes and eat my dinner. Pick it up and check if they're still there, "Hello, oh, sorry about that, my neighbor Bob was just out front showing me the new cam he bought for his pick-up. Are you into trucks? It's a really fun hob... Oops, hold on a sec, my son just shit his pants and I need to go grab some wipes." Put the phone back down... rinse, repeat.
"What is the answer?" (Silence) "In that case, what is the question?" --Gertrude Stein
You want to call people of that state, you buy the list, which costs more annually than the entire federal list, for what that's worth.
Cool, not only do they make it difficult to telemarket in their state, they're probably turning a profit on those that do call in their state.
Looks win win for the citizens to me.
Don't you think the whole "insensitive clod!" thing is a bit played out on this site? Seeing it makes me want to puke. Seriously, can we think of some new funny thing to say? "insensitive clod!" has been exploited to it's full potential.
The issue revolves around some states whose Do Not Call ... prohibit telemarketers from calling anyone on a Do Not Call, regardless of an existing business relationship.
I actually wandered into your store (online or otherwise) and bought something. You call it a business relationship. I call it a purchase.
DO NOT CALL ME at me home because I bought cheetos from you. DO NOT START SPAMMING me left and right because I bought something from your online store AND for heaven's sake don't start sending junk mailto my house! And what's worse, don't give my name to all YOUR FRIENDS (people who paid for you to give up my info) and have them start calling me, spamming me, and sending me crap!
You are not my business partner just because I bought something from you once or twice and you certainly aren't entitled to anything from me but fair payment for what I bought.
If I want to buy something else from you, I'll find you or one of your "friends". Otherwise, LEAVE ME ALONE.
Well, you must be new here.