Don't Want a Phonebook? Give Up Your Privacy

newscloud writes "Seattle will soon shut down its popular phonebook opt-out website as a result of a costly settlement with Yellow Pages publishers. Going forward, the only way to stop unwanted phonebook deliveries will be to visit the industry's opt out site and provide them with your personal information. They will share it with their clients, most of whom are direct marketing agencies, who in turn commit not to use it improperly. The Federal Court of Appeals ruled in October that The Yellow Pages represent protected free speech of corporations (including Canada's Yellow Media Inc.); defending and settling the lawsuit cost Seattle taxpayers $781,503. The city said the program's popularity led to a reduction of 2 million pounds of paper waste annually."

Comments

File a police complaint for littering

[BitZtream]

They stop pretty quickly after you do it.

Re:File a police complaint for littering

[Anonymous Coward]

Throw them in the street. Once they starting blocking the drains, etc. the city will take notice.

Re:File a police complaint for littering

[CastrTroy]

I was thinking it would be a good idea to just return it to them. If they have a local office, it would be great if 5000 (or maybe more) people all showed up the day after they were delivered to return them. I think it would really send the message home. That or create some big monument where you collect them all and build a giant statue to show just how much waste is being generated.

Re:File a police complaint for littering

[ByOhTek]

Not-for Profit Organization idea

Yellow Page Removal and Protest
Don't want the yellow pages? Don't want to be put on a mass marketing mailing list because they want to make a profit from you regardless of not providing a service to you (by the way, that's called extortion)?

We'll take the phone books off you hands. We request a donation of $0.50 to $1.00, but heck, we'll do it for free...
We'll use the to inform the phone book companies what we think of their practices...

Re:File a police complaint for littering

[Bill_the_Engineer]

The problem is that this was a case of the city offering an opt out for the phonebooks. It's not a legitimate 1st amendment issue, there is no right to an audience anywhere in the 1st amendment. Now, had the city made it opt in, that likely would have been different, but the courts seriously fucked up the ruling by suggesting that the people don't have a right to say no to the deliveries through the city's system.

The courts decided correctly that this was a violation of the 1st amendment. The government is not allowed to censor speech regardless if that is what the citizens want. The 1st amendment is there to protect unpopular speech. Now you as an audience member are free to ignore the speech. However, you have no right to ask the government to squelch the speech on your behalf. In this particular case, Seattle was using the opt-out website as a way to lower the number of phonebooks that end up filling their landfill.

Seattle should set up phonebook collection sites around the city and encourage its citizens to discard their phonebooks there. Afterwards, Seattle could bill the phonebook companies for the cost of disposing the phonebooks. This way nobody's first amendment rights are being violated and there is a disincentive for the phonebook companies to deliver phonebooks that nobody wants. Economic forces would come into play and eventually the phonebook companies would only want to deliver phonebooks to people that would most likely use them. The only issue being that an ordinance which gives the city to right to demand reimbursement for disposal will need to be passed and survive the tests by the court.

A side-effect of the disposal site program would be the ability for the city to proclaim how many phonebooks are collected as unwanted by the recipients. This public campaign, in theory, would lower the value of yellow book advertising.

Re:File a police complaint for littering

[pla]

Trash.. I think the courts can probably figure out a distinction between waste and actual speech.

Clearly, they cannot - Because phone books do not count as fucking speech.

Sick of this "corporate speech" BS. We can't have campaign finance reform because CORPORATE SPEECH. Now we can't opt out of phonebooks because CORPORATE SPEECH. But try to protest at the G8 summit, and you'll get to see just how much HUMAN speech matters anymore.

We need to end the rights of incorporation now. We can come up with a short list of powers granted to companies to facilitate doing business, but when real live natural born humans take a back seat to fictional entities, time to change the laws before things start burning.

Re:File a police complaint for littering

[geekoid]

They have a right to deliver it to your door step, and you have a right to deliver it to there door step.
So get people to either take the phone book to employees houses, or put them in front of their business door.
preferably many at once.

Just lie

[Mephistophocles]

So just visit their website and lie about everything. Make the information offensive, even, or obviously false (all except the address, I guess, which they have to have). 99% of the mail I get is junk mail anyway, so much so that I rarely look at it and just use automatically it for fire starter, animal bedding, etc.

Never give up privacy, even under duress. When this kind of thing happens, meet them on a level playing field and corrupt their database with junk info.

Take .... many phone books to the court house.

[Bomarc]

As the Federal Court of Appeals says... leaving phone books is protected free speech. Well, exercise the right! Take every phone book you can find, and leave it at the (Federal Court of Appeals) court house - and let THEM deal with the problem.

Re:Take .... many phone books to the court house.

[TFAFalcon]

Wrong. That would just mean the taxpayers have to pay for removing them. Leave them on the front yards of the judges involved.

At what point does free speech become littering?

[jfengel]

There have always been limitations on "free speech" when it comes to pollution. Even an individual isn't allowed to rant about the lizard men with a megaphone at 3 AM.

The phone books are put on private property without permission. Is there some law that gives them permission? They're welcome, I suppose, to stand on the sidewalk and read the phone book at me, if they want, or even to stand there with the book open. I suppose they could pay the Post Office to mail it to me, since they have a special legal exemption.

If they've got some kind of blanket exemption, then of course an opt-out is going to violate privacy. And if this is the case, it sounds like they need to eliminate the blanket exemption, and I don't see "free speech" being a defense against that, since your right to speech ends where my property begins.

Re:Other uses for phone books

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Backstops for BB gun and air rifle targets. Why should I pay money for those when I get several free ones each year and they stop as many or more shots as the rubber or plastic ones that cost money, especially the large entire metro area ones that come about once a year.

Re:Other uses for phone books

[Krojack]

According the paper for my local recycling pick-up, they won't take phone books. Go figure.