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.

Comments

I wonder..

[Kjuib]

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.

Re:I wonder..

[jayhawk88]

Oh but see, you have an "existing business relationship" with them, since this one time you bought batteries at Target with your Bank of America Visa credit card, Bank of America sold your student loan and personal information to Wells Fargo, who sold it to Sallie Mae, who sold it's list of customers to Fannie Mae, who shares a database with several mortage companies, some of whom use cold calling to drum up business during the winter months.

How dare you not recognize the legitimate and in no way phony "existing business relationship". How do you expect Bruno's Mortgage and High Interest Loans to not communicate with you, their (possible, potential, maybe if they're drunk when we call, three times removed) customer?

Re:I wonder..

[JonasH]

What part of DO NOT CALL dont they understand?

I think it's the "NOT". They seem to have no problems at all with "DO CALL".

Re:I wonder..

[networkBoy]

Dunno about phone service but I use them as subsedised entertainment:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
I keep a copy at the phone. If I don't have time for it I just hang up on them instead.

Really is fun. Two memorable calls:
1) I got yelled at by a super about wasting their time.
2) Some girl broke down at the "why are you doing it then" and started crying. I got uncomfortable and hung up on her :P
-nB

Doesn't bother me anymore

[Apreche]

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.

Re:Doesn't bother me anymore

[eln]

If the only reason you have the landline is so you can get DSL, then just don't hook up a regular telephone to it. The phone can't ring if the phone doesn't exist.

Good Afternoon, How Are You?

[Duke Machesne]

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?

Clearly for Federal Regulation

[sterno]

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.

It is called harrasment

[John Seminal]

These marketing companies are run by evil dirty bastards who will do anything to make a penny.

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.

Calls aren't like emails at least

[Hachey]

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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Charities

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

If you're going to give to a charity, do it anonymously. Otherwise, you'll be put on a "sucker" list and you'll not only be continuously called by the original charity that you gave to, but also charities that they sold your name and number to.

I have blown off PBS because of this!

Re:Charities

[fatcatman]

We donated to Samaritan's Purse one year. Our church was doing a "fill a shoebox with things for african children" deal, and we thought it would be nice. So we put some useful items and a couple of toys in a shoebox for the poor little 3rd world children, and included the required $5 to "help cover postage."

Since then, Samaritan's Purse has spent a hell of a lot more than $5 sending me full color documents printed on nice glossy cardstock, begging for more money. Every couple of weeks I get another one of these in the mail. Now tell me why I'd donate anything more to them when they completely wasted the $5 I gave them? That was supposed to help get my package to the poor little african kid, not be spent begging me for more money.

(yes, I know *my* $5 wasn't used to mail me, but the point is they're massively wasting money, and I'm not going to contribute to that. If I were out begging for money I'd be mailing cheap newsprint once or twice a year, so as to use the money given to me appropriately)

State DNC lists are redundant

[p_conrad]

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.