Slashdot Mirror
FTC Bans Prerecorded Telemarketing Drivel
coondoggie writes "In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather, and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed recorded telemarketing calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008."
Quit leaving that fucking hole in these things !
Nobody ever willingly agrees to that shit, they're tricked into agreeing every single time.
Nobody wants to fucking hear it, quit making laws that don't do anything other than calm people down for 5 minutes, you fucking assholes !
God damnit, this shit is more irritating than the fucking telemarketers !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Usually when government bans things like this, it exempts itself from the ban. For example, does this at all affect prerecorded political calls?
Perhaps I'm just insensitive but when people make a voluntary decision to work somewhere that is propagating that sort of low-grade evil, I feel they take the good (higher pay) with the bad (people who you broke the law to disturb late at night yelling at you.)
It seems a bit foolish or arrogant to me, to think you deserve anything less than being held responsible for what you're doing.
I don't think the "I was just doing my job, and it was the only place that paid well" thing holds any credence.
Lastly, as much as these people irritate you, try your best not to lose your temper with them. Most of them are probably students like I was with terrible managers (the cream of the crap) and strict floor regulations that leave them tethered to their computer, sitting upright, unable to drink coffee or indulge in anything, taking calls for their entire eight hour shift with no breaks, having to sit idley while the death threats poured through the lines, having a one-minute-per-day bathroom break policy and doing it all for a paycheque a meaningless few dollars higher than a McD's salaryman.
If I can, by my actions, make it harder for the bottom-feeding telemarketing companies to operate I will do so. This includes making it so that even starving students are unwilling to work for these companies. By taking a job with these bottom-feeders you are part of the problem. Don't want the aggro? Don't take the job.
That's just crap. Move if it's so bad where you live.
You sound just like people who justify joining gangs and committing crimes instead of finding honest work because there are just no other opportunities for them--the system is corrupt/racist/biased against them, so the only thing they can do is steal from honest people who have actually made something of themselves. There are always other options, but you were just too lazy or complacent to take them. You chose a scummy job, you have to live with that fact. Asking for sympathy because you didn't have enough self respect to better yourself and find a job that didn't involve making yourself part of the one of the most universally loathed classes on Earth is almost as contemptible as taking the job in the first place.
Any abuse a telemarketer gets is deserved in spades.
"If call centres disobey all the previous rules and obligations, what makes you think they're going to adhere to this one? Especially call centres in India where these laws have little jurisdiction?"
Because the new rule says that if you call after 9pm, a B-2 Spirit will drop napalm on your call centre.
(Boy, wouldn't that be satisfying...)
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
If you don't speak english and thus unable to follow the instructions to call,
With all due respect, if you ("you" in general, not the parent poster) can't speak English then what the fuck are you doing living in an English speaking country? I live in New Zealand and we get these stories all the time how there are special translation services being offered and suggested for those who are "English impaired". WTF? How are these people even allowed to immigrate here?
If I go live in China, I'm sure as hell they'd expect me to speak Chinese. Stupid socialist governments.
It's amazing how versatile this document is.
Your law advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting telemarketing 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.)
( ) 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
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) 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
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) 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
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
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?
( ) Incompatiblity 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
(x) 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!
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Believe it or not, this works every time under the FDCPA. The reason why is that 99.9% of the people complain on the phone where the debt collection agency is not liable. Hardly anyone ever writes a letter.
Not everyone believes that it should be a requirement to write anyone a letter who calls to ask them to stop. With some phone numbers, it's less hastle and easer to simply get another number and drop the number that is on the bad boys list. One call fixes it instead of a letter writing campaign.
This phone abuse is one of the reasons phones & phone numbers are becomming disposable. They get clogged and die like an old email account.
The pitty is the numbers get recycled quickly to some poor unsuspecting new customer who then has to deal with the trash associated with the old phone number.
The truth shall set you free!
This is my entire problem with debt collections, there is basically no regulation and when you demand proof of a debt, if they drop the matter they are not required as far as I know to send you proof! What will often happened, is that company will transfer the "debt" over to another company (usually owned by the same people and usually to the guy in the cubicle next to the one that called you). So legally, now we have a different company with this "debt" to collect, they will hold it and then try to collect again from you, hoping you have forgotten about the first call months or even years later.
I was changing jobs last year, so ended up picking up cobra for 6 months to cover the upcoming birth of my son. Carriers changed multiple times during that time (my old company sucked some royal donkey balls) lots of junk in the mail blahblah. Took five months, two appeals letters but everything is sorted (I hate medical insurance, all this because you get different information on requirements and what you owe, depending on what time of day you call, if you are standing on one leg and need to fart!). Now, if I am silly enough to listen to the dribble from the debt collectors (yes some bills got past due, due to the confusion) I demand they send written proof that I still owe them money, my wife and I have found that some will try to "collect a debt" even after you've paid, because if they can get "free" money from you, then they will. It is sad, sad, borderline criminal little industry.
Tes