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

[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

[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.

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.