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Verizon Bases $5 Fee To Not Publish Your Phone Number On 'Systems and IT' Costs
coondoggie writes "Let's say that for whatever reason, you'd rather your telephone number not be published. If you are a Verizon customer, that privacy privilege will cost you $5 a month. And how does Verizon justify such a significant fee for such an insignificant service? 'The cost charged to offer unlisted phone numbers is chiefly systems and IT based,' a media relations spokesman for the company tells Network World. (Asking the same question of online customer service elicited a predictably unenlightening response.) Sixty dollars a year to keep an unpublished number unpublished? Does that seem plausible?"
It's called "alternate revenue streams" and they will try to nickle&dime-XXL you for almost everything. A one-time charge would be plausible, but a MONTHLY fee? This is gauging. But... guess what? There's nothing you can do.
Their system is design to make money for them while annoying you. I'd say it is working.
Verizon has built a system where it is cost-effective to track every single $.10 text message and minute of call time; but it costs $5/month, forever, to keep a database field set to 'no' rather than 'yes'... Surely this is entirely plausible, no?
Because fuck you, that's why.
Welp at least I can go to one of the many other carriers, because there is no way they would implement such a fee themselves! I'm glad competition is so fierce between wireless carriers, I always feel like I'm getting a great deal.
POTS vendors have always had this policy. It's stupid, but it's easy to circumvent. Since they let you publish the listing under any name you want, you make one up. When I had a landline, it was under "Gigo Hasp" (old IBM mainframe joke).
When you threaten to do something bad to someone, like give out their phone number, unless you are paid, you are engaging in extortion.
E Proelio Veritas.
I call bullshit on you.
To make a phone book they have to collate a list of phone subscribers from the phone company. To exclude a subscriber, they simply don't turn over that subscriber's record to whoever makes the books. Or alternatively, the phone book company doesn't print the names of people who have the privacy bit set on their record. How can it possibly be so difficult?
How can it cost $5/month to skip over somebody's name?
What legal issues are there that would justify the same cost?
Since you're so smart maybe you can tell us exactly why.
$60 a year for doing what? Nothing? Surely marking a number as unlisted in the subscriber database is a once-off 30 activity of at most 5 minutes. So who's being paid $720 an hour for doing it?
I doubt it's even a 5 minute job. I work for a large telco in Europe. If a customer over here asks for their number not to be printed, we have to honour that request and we're not allowed (by law) to charge a cent for doing so. The phone directory is based on a database, which is linked to our customer care software. If a customer asks for their number to be removed from the phone book, a customer care agent clicks the button on their screen and the database is updated overnight. Factoring in a staff member's time, overheads for running the call centre etc., a call like this costs on average the equivalent of just over $4. Charging $60 per year is outrageous.
I currently work for a phone company, and less than 2 years ago was part of the "number management" group.
You're full of shit.
Phone numbers are published by a 3rd party. Once a year we do a SQL dump of our existing customers and send that over. That's how the number gets published. Our billing system has a flag: nonpublish and it's y/n
The SQL statement involved is so fucking trivial it's ridiculous. There is NO reason at all to charge for this based on the difficulty of excluding you.
But then my middle name is '; drop table subscribers;
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Where did you learn this behavior, Verizon?"
"I learned it from you, Ma Bell! I learned it by watching you!"
But I'm waiting to start receiving the monthly bill for not having Verizon.
That's how much they WON'T get paid for selling your phone number :(
I worked at a major telco in Oz for 7years as a technical lead on their mission critical systems, The telco was an old school government monopoly that had just been semi-privatized. I agree adding something like this their systems to comply with the law would take much longer and cost a lot more than most people would think, but once it's done it's done. It's then just a fucking checkbox that needs to be ticked once, not once a month.
This is nothing more than a company thumbing their nose at regulators by saying "If we are forced to provide X as part of our service then we will do so in such a way that ensures nobody wants to use X". Such behavior is frowned on over here, it would land the company in court where they would likely be levied a fine with lots of zeros on the end. Verizon know this because they operate in Oz and somehow manage to handle unlisted Aussie numbers without the need for a recurring charge.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
They must not be using Oracle. With Oracle, nulls are the same as empty values. That's why Oracle databases are so much lighter to carry around than other databases.