Geist Creates His Own Do-Not-Call List

average_cdn writes "Canadians looking to put a stop to pesky telemarketing calls before the federal government's do-not-call registry takes effect this summer have a new tool at their disposal. At IOptOut.ca, Canadians can enter their phone number and e-mail address and simply choose the organizations they would prefer not to hear from while the website generates a mass request that the user be added to those companies' do-not-call lists. The site, a beta version of which was launched yesterday, is the brainchild of University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist and features information on how to avoid telemarketing calls from more than 140 different companies and organizations. Mr. Geist said that iOptOut helps Canadians finish the job that the do-not-call registry failed to complete."

Comments

Well that's great

[Draped Crusader]

...for Canada!

Re:Well that's great

[Naughty Bob]

I think this'll slowly fail after the initial capital runs out.

It's not like they'll be able to support it by selling ads....

Re:Well that's great

[Ron Harwood]

I haven't seen anything that says he's selling ads - can you point me at it?

Very cool!

[RobinH]

Very cool, I'll probably tell my family about this.

However, I've noticed that since we moved two years ago, and we got a Vonage account, we don't actually get any unsolicited calls (except for the cable company which keeps trying to sell us their home phone service, but that has mostly stopped). I think it's either because we're not in the Bell directory, or because if I go over 500 minutes a month, then I pay some per minute charge, and that technically makes it illegal for telemarketers to call me, just like cell phones.

Re:Very cool!

[0100010001010011]

Fastest way to get a telemarketer off of the phone: "This is a cell phone."

Never been called by the same company twice and most just hang up on me without even a good bye.

Re:Very cool!

[waveman]

One thing I do is I say "Just a moment". Then I leave the phone off the hook for about ten minutes. This wastes their time quite effectively. I even had one of them get quite angry at me, which was good.

Re:Very cool!

[allanw]

Are you absolutely sure you're not getting any false positives there?

Re:Very cool!

[Jorophose]

For some reason people like to rage against telemarkerters...

But really now this is the most reasonable way to handle the situation if you don't want to be called back because management doesn't seem to understand the concept of "No thank you, I'm not interested.".

I've worked with telemarketers, and the stuff people do to them is rather crazy. It's not the grunts you want to bitch at, complain to the heads of the company.

Re:Very cool!

[jwsmith00]

I prefer "Hello (short pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (short pause) Is anyone there? (short pause) Hello" Click. They sometimes call back after they realize there was nothing wrong on their end.

Re:Very cool!

[CastrTroy]

If it's a real person, and they actually want to talk to you, they'll figure they got disconnected somehow and call right back.

Re:Very cool!

[cybereal]

One thing I do is I say "Just a moment". Then I leave the phone off the hook for about ten minutes. This wastes their time quite effectively. I even had one of them get quite angry at me, which was good.

Due to unfortunate requirement for food, water, and shelter, I had to be a telemarketer for several years. Truly this was the most painful job I've ever had, and I've worked at Taco Bell. Your strategy of leaving the phone off the hook for a while is not remotely unique. But I assure you, many telemarketers appreciate it. Seriously.

What you may fail to recognize is that telemarketing is a slave driving business. The people on the phone, we didn't make squat off the sales. What we did was maintain our right to continue working a complete day. If you didn't maintain a certain quota, they would simply send you home. And the wages? Well there was this fancy thing called a "differential." What that meant was, if you made X hours in the pay period, your wage would be increased by Y dollars. So to make the meager 7.25/hr. I was told I'd be making, I'd have to work at least 60 of the 80 hours possible in a two week period. Obviously not a difficult thing to do in a normal job but..

Imagine for a moment that you made just enough money to get by, you had maybe $30 a week after all of your bills were paid to buy groceries for you, your wife, and your daughter. You worked as a cold calling sales person, constantly searching but never finding another, more reasonable job. IN the meantime, you went to work each day, starting at 7 am to call the east coast, and sell things that nobody in their right mind would ever want to buy. If you did not make at least two sales per hour on average, you would be sent home before lunch time. Now imagine that, despite working very hard, your two weeks came up and you missed the mark. Suddenly your paycheck wasn't only less because of fewer hours, no, your rate was 30% less, putting you around 50% of what you would normally have made. What the hell would you do?

Not all callcenters are this bad, not all phone jobs as painful, but many are and I hope some of you can have a better understanding of the tenacity of phone sales people.

Oh and another aspect more relevant to your "method" is that the calls must be made constantly. Non-stop, save a few very short breaks throughout the day for the restroom. That means that the moment you hang up, the phone immediately calls another person. In fact, when enough agents are on the floor, the phone system PRE-DIALS so that when you click off one call, you're IMMEDIATELY on another. This goes on all day long. You try that sometime, and tell me how you feel after several months of it. So trust me when I say, that 10 minute break your telemarketer risked enduring was a godsend to them.

Re:Very cool!

[Dunbal]

I usually interrupt the telemarketer and ask his or her name and the company they represent. Then I tell them to place me on their "do not call" list. Usually this works. A few times I have been called back by the same company days later. Again I immediately interrupt the telemarketer, ask their name, and ask to speak to their supervisor. Once the supervisor comes on, I inform him or her that I am currently recording this call, and that on day X at time Y I was called by employee "Z", asked to be placed on the "Do not call list". However I am being called again. I tell the supervisor to please ensure that I do not receive any more calls from their company. Usually does the trick.

Re:Very cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh I did it for a few months for a "respectable" company (Sears) selling extended warranties - sorry - "maintenance agreements". We could call Sears customers that were in the database and the computer spotted that their warranty on their fridge/lawnmower/whatever was about to expire. It wasn't as bad as cold calling since they WERE customers and we were told to initially inquire if they were happy with their product - but then when it came time to offer them the extended warranty (usually at around half the original purchase price) most people balked and some even became hostile.

      Of course we were on minimum wage + commission based on closed sales, but it was NON-STOP work - every time you clicked off a call you immediately were put through to another customer - and often had to wait for the computer to look up the customer's information (Hello Mr.................. Jameson, I'm calling from Sears about your....). Of course I quit that job, especially after the manager thought it would be a great idea to keep calling people until 9pm.

Re:Very cool!

[billcopc]

The problem with any "bad" job is people continue to work there.

If call centers suck so bad, why do people take the jobs ? You're encouraging the abuse by enabling these bureaucratic slave drivers. I don't know of anyone who likes call centers, not as an employee, not as a victim either. The only people who like them are the so-called "clients", the ones whose products are being sold or supported, because not only is it cheap, but it also cuts maintenance costs thanks to the many people who would rather buy a new thingamajig than have to deal with retarded call center queues all afternoon.

One thing is consistent: there are always companies looking to hire, in fact many of them complain that it's so hard to find good people. I know why: they're all pissing their life away in a call center for peanuts, while the good jobs go unfilled. If you've got the social skills, patience and computer smarts to survive a call center job, those same skills could be applied in just about any other office environment for less stress and maybe even more money.

Shit, I know a lot of people sitting in cushy government jobs who barely have two brain cells to rub together. They wouldn't last a day working for a telemarketer, yet they're making four times as much money for a quarter of the effort. Full benefits, too!

Re:Very cool!

[Dunbal]

Because they hire almost anybody and minimum wage is better than NO wage.

Their turnover on employees is pretty damned high though. I don't know many "career telemarketers".

Re:Very cool!

[mpe]

I prefer "Hello (short pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (long pause) Hello (short pause) Is anyone there? (short pause) Hello" Click. They sometimes call back after they realize there was nothing wrong on their end.

An alternative would be to do the same thing, but in a language the caller is not expecting and hopefully dosn't understand. Possibly one of the few situations where it can be an advantage to know Klingon.

Re:Very cool!

[porpnorber]

So vote for someone who will replace the minimum wage with a no questions asked universal basic income. There is no reason to collaborate in building a society that sucks to live in!

Do not call

[TheRecklessWanderer]

I think I'll just stick to my never listed and currently unlisted phone number.

Re:This man lives to his name

[garett_spencley]

"Is this a possible cure for spam where its legal or the laws are inadequate?"

All this does is send an e-mail on your behalf to various organizations asking that you be placed on their internal do-not-call-list. By-law any company in Canada that engages in telemarketing must remove you from their call list when requested.

The ironic part is that the system actually sends out bulk e-mail in order to operate. Whether or not that is "SPAM" is open to interpretation.

Farming

[ChatHuant]

Good way to collect active and not spam-trapped e-mail addresses, and maybe link them to phone numbers as well. As a company, I may not send mail or call the phone numbers Mr. Geist is so nicely forwarding to me, but what stops me from selling them to spammers? I don't have a direct relationship with the customer, so, AFAICT there is no legal issue.

Don't cross the streams...

[owlnation]

who ya gonna call?

Geistbusters!

Re:This man lives to his name

[DittoBox]

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(x) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
(x) requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) huge existing software investment in smtp
( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
(x) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of spam
( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
(x) botnets

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(x) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
( ) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
( ) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

furthermore, this is what i think about you:

(x) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:This man lives to his name

[hedwards]

The ironic part is that the system actually sends out bulk e-mail in order to operate. Whether or not that is "SPAM" is open to interpretation. That would really depend whether or not the emails were solicited and whether or not they stopped when requested.

Calling somebody should be considered consent so far as one is contacting the individual to opt out or inform them of the mistake. If the system only does that and stops after the notification is made then it isn't spam.

The only tricky part is setting things up so that it isn't ripe for abuse. And ensuring that the system won't continuously churn out emails for requests that have already been completed.

http://www.catalogchoice.org/ is a similar idea applied to catalogs. The site just sends opt outs, and in some cases opt ins when the person wants a new catalog, and they send a request to the business to stop sending more. The basic way that it's set up makes it advantageous for both sides.

You have to give them your address and the name on the mailing, but it's just information which is already publicly available to the company to get the correct mailing stopped.

how to deal with telemarketers

[the brown guy]

Having worked as a telemarketer for a few weeks, the most effective way to get them to not call is to say: a) No English. b) I'm not over 18...and no nobody else in the house is either.

Re:how to deal with telemarketers

[psychodelicacy]

Ah, yes - it's even better if you actually speak an obscure language. I speak Welsh at people with clipboards or Bibles who try to talk to me in the street - strangely, I'd never thought of trying it with telemarketers. Though I think often the problem is that they have my name from somewhere, so I have to at least find out whether they're legitimately calling to, say, offer me a job or something before telling them to screw themselves.

Re:How about just a simple, "No thanks," and hang

[ceoyoyo]

I'm not talking about ME. I don't feel the least bit of guilt about telling them I'm REALLY interested and then setting the phone on my subwoofer for the next ten minutes.

Now, my grandmother, she comes from a different era, when hanging up on someone who's talking to you is something you didn't do. She's also characteristic of the demographic who tend to believe things nice people on the phone tell them. In other words, precisely the demographic scummy telemarketers are after.

Personally, I think the world would be a much nicer place if the general public let advertisers know in no uncertain terms that they're not appreciated.

Re:Indeed, it's the company not the person

[mpe]

People always seem to "shoot the messenger" rather than the company doing the actual advertising.

How is the person being called ment to know who this company is? Giving the name, address and telephone number of the company concerned may not be part of the caller's script; they may have been trained to give misleading information and it's very unlikely that they will know the executives home phone numbers for either their own comapny or a "client".