‘Do not call’ list on hold
U.S. court rules FTC overstepped its authority when it set up the list to block telemarketing calls.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/09/24/technology/ftc_donotcall/index.htm?cnn=yes
Once again, we are shown the truth of the Golden Rule - Those who have the gold make the rules.
Hopefully the FTC will be able to overturn this.
Even if not, the value of this do-not-call database was to put in concrete numbers the disgust that Americans have for their telemarketers.
The do-not-call list doesn’t apply to research calls. “Coincidentally”, i’m getting 3 to 5 research calls a day now. They all start like this: “we’re not selling anything; you were chosen to participate in a research project…” I haven’t figured out a strategy to deal with these yet. I’ve been hanging up during the greeting. But i’m noticing that the majority of these are actually machines, that is, there isn’t a person on the other side (you know because it keeps talking no matter what you say). So i’m thinking that leaving the line open for 5 minutes before hanging up might be a better strategy. But hanging up is easier.
My wife is home all day. She has taken to not even answering the phone unless she recognises the voice on the answering machine. A pain, but you have to do what you have to do.
Isn’t there something in the constitution about privacy?
Two words: “Privacy Manager”
I pay SBC four bucks a month. Every time a call is received from a blocked, hidden, 8xx or otherwise unavailable number, Privacy Manager intercepts the call and asks the caller for their identity/purpose. Most phone spammers do not reply, according to SBC. If they don’t, the phone company hangs up on them.
If they do respond, the company then calls you and a recording identifies itself as Privacy Manager. It then plays the caller’s response and offers you three options - press 1 to accept, 2 to reject, and 3 to reject with prejudice (don’t call back - ever).
My phone used to ring upwards of forty times a day, at least thrice between 8:30 and 9:00 pm (the legal cutoff time). Now it’s one or two.
Best four bcks a month I ever spent!
Hmmm, for 2 bucks a month i may get it. I haven’t gotten it yet because i think it’s part of a ridiculous cycle:
(1) telemarketers start calling
(2) phone company sells us caller id
(3) phone company sells immunity from caller id to telemarketers
(4) phone company sells us privacy manager
What’s next, now they sell immunity from privacy manager to the telemarketers?
But if it’s cheap, it may be worth it. I mostly don’t answer the phone unless i recognize the number or name on the caller id. If it’s somebody i want to talk to, he or she will hopefully start talking to the answering machine, and then i pick up.
[quote=“glauber”]Hmmm, for 2 bucks a month i may get it. I haven’t gotten it yet because i think it’s part of a ridiculous cycle:
(1) telemarketers start calling
(2) phone company sells us caller id
(3) phone company sells immunity from caller id to telemarketers
(4) phone company sells us privacy manager
What’s next, now they sell immunity from privacy manager to the telemarketers?
[/quote]
It’s almost like this, but not quite. Actually companies that have a PBX for their internal phone network need additional equipment to generate the outgoing caller ID. My company (which does not do telemarketing!) hasn’t forked over the cash to buy that piece of PBX equipment (times are tough!), so our caller ID comes up as ‘unavaliable’. That’s exactly what most of the telemarketing call centers are doing too.
The sequence is really more like this…
The analogy is more like if an exterminator company set loose bunches of roaches in your house and then sold you exterminator service.
Yes, you can bet that the “research” calls are going to increase.
We’ve had a no-call list just like this in Colorado for over a year now. It’s wonderful.
The news report I read stated that the FTC (or maybe the FCC) had not been authorized by law (Congress) to restrict this sort of telemarketing. Congress can pass legislation to authorize the regulatory agencies to do this.
The only thing I know to do is to just hang up the second it’s obviously a telemarketer. Don’t say hello, don’t say no thank you, just hang up and that’s it, because once you start talking, they never shut up.
I have a Telezapper, and it’s helped tremendously (I’m home during the day, and was getting so many calls I was tempted to leave the phone off the hook…but I can’t do that with my daughter in school). I rarely get calls anymore, other than those from companies that have “established a relationship with me” (which wouldn’t have been blocked by the do not call list in any case). What irritates me about this is that telemarketers (and, evidently, the courts) are under the impression that they have the “right” to invade my home as an expression of “free speech.” All the do not call list would have done was establish who DOESN’T want calls from these people (badly enough to act to put their names on a list)…why should they have the “right” to call people who don’t want to talk to them? Somehow I don’t think pushy salesmen invading the privacy of your home is what the framers of the Bill of Rights had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment.
Redwolf
I saw this one coming. :roll:
I use the Telezapper, too. Since I have the habit of screening my calls anyway, it works for me. It’s rather satisfying to hear an incoming call get nipped in the bud. 
Yes, but this isn’t going to happen because Congress is sensitive to the money that the telemarketers’ lobby pours on them. That’s basically why this donotcall list idea hasn’t been implemented before. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but this is a hard one for our intrepid representatives. The FTC is less sensitive to money pressure, since they aren’t under the obligation to finance very expensive re-ellection campains.
Anyway, caller id goes a long way to help. It’s annoying to have to spend money with it, but all of the telemarketers will show up either as “unavailable” or (rarely) as a company name. I get several calls a day from people trying to sell me books in Spanish (because of my last name - Ribeiro); they show up as “Florida Call”. The only problem is “unavailable” could be somebody calling from a public phone or my Mom calling from Brazil, and sometimes they don’t leave messages. Calls from other states also often don’t get identified. So maybe the privacy manager would be a good thing. Sigh… :roll:
I didn’t buy the telezapper because i never believed it worked, and for over $50, i didn’t want to get one to find out. I’m rather surprised to hear that it does work. Isn’t this the little box that sends a signal that says that your phone has been disconnected? And would this mess up something that you might actually want to hear, such as an automated police bulletin?
I heard a story on NPR this afternoon about this. There was a lawyer saying that the Do-not-call registry is unnecessary, because: 1) all one has to do is register with the Direct Marketing Association, and 2) if one is ever called after that, all one has to do is ask to be put in the do-not-call registry of the company that calls you.
I’m listed with the DMA. It’s voluntary for the companies. I still get calls. The DMA has no public phone number, so there’s no efficient way to report it when you think companies are cheating. I’ve tried getting registered with the companies that are calling me. This: 1) is very difficult, and in many cases impossible. The person calling almost never has the authority to do it. I ask to talk to a supervisor – sometimes possible, sometimes not, since many people work from home. The supervisor usually says something to the effect, “We just make the calls the company tells us to, we don’t make the lists, there’s nothing we can do.” I can occasionally get a number to call, seldom a 24/7 toll-free number, so I have to make a toll call, be put on hold for 20 minutes, and make it between 9 and 4. Another thing is, many calls come from franchises, who work from both lists the parent company provides and local lists. I got off the lists of like 20 different home-alarm franchises all selling the same brand.
The long and short of it is the plans that are in place are difficult to implement and they don’t work either.
The good news is that Congress may act quickly. The other good news is, if they don’t, the main problem is that the list wasn’t implemented properly, not that a list is illegal or unconstitutional.
After listening to the coverage all day, I think you’re wrong this time. Congress has to weight the telespammers’ money against the fact that FIFTY MILLION households signed up. No congressdweeb will EVER risk PO’ing that many voters, Money matters little when you’re tossed out for being a butthead.
I don’t quite know what the little elves inside it do, but I’m pretty satisfied. The only calls it doesn’t zap are local pseudo-charities, and I don’t answer those any more once I found out how charitable they really are. As to automated police bulletins, Glauber, I don’t know. It lets my Mom in Florida leave messages, anyway. I’ll have to look at prices again. I don’t remember what I paid, but $50 doesn’t ring a bell for me.
I don’t even have a home phone. My wife and I have a shared minute cellular plan with three stations. One is her business line, one is my business line, and one is a personal line that generaly stays at home. The beauty of this is that cell phones numbers are unlisted. We will never be hit by automatic dialers because there is no way for them to find our number. The only way anyone can get our number is if we give it to them. With unlimited weekend minutes, free station to station calls, and free long distance, this actually costs us less then having a land line would. Since we ditched the land line, the only solicitation calls I ever recieve are business related and for products or services that I am actually interested in and even those are rare.
I’ve never gotten an automated police bulletin (what are they for?), so I can’t tell you if the Telezapper would block those or not, but they really do work with telemarketers. The first week or so you have one, you get a lot of “dead rings” (telemarketers’ computers ringing in and then disconnecting), but that tapers off pretty quickly. I’m really happy with ours (had it for a little over a year now).
Caller ID wouldn’t do me much good because I have (and answer) phones all over the house, most of which are “plain vanilla” (with no capacity to show caller ID). The Telezapper was a lot cheaper than replacing the phones would be.
Redwolf
Boy, Chuck, I sure hope you are right. Although I wouldn’t put much of a wager on it, I’m sure hoping to see the right thing get done.
The idea that they won’t listen to us because they’ll cave in to Big
Money is a self-actualizing prophecy.
The idea that they will listen to us if we make a stink,
because otherwise we’ll vote em out of office is another
self-actualizing prophecy.
You know it seems that more people die in cyclones and
storms in the South than elsewhere in the USA.
So some research was done as to why. Apparently
the disparity is that folks in the South tend to be
fatalists. They figure when their number is up,
it’s up. So while other Americans would scurry into
the basement, they sit there in the living room
and await the verdict of Fate.
I rarely get telemarketing calls anymore, because I simply told them, whenever they call, to take me off their calling list. Now, I rarely get any. It’s simple and it works. We didn’t get any tonight, or last night, or the night before…
I just hate it that someone thinks they have the RIGHT to make a bell RING in my house! That’s not freedom of speech.
JP [/url]
I think those researchers weren’t familiar with the bullshitting habits of southerners. I would conjecture that they tend to stay in the path of a storm because either they’re too lazy to move their ass or else they’re too stubborn (or ignorant) to admit to themselves that they are vulnerable. But that surely ain’t what they’re going to tell no researcher.