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| Phone spam |
| 05.21.04 (5:33 am) [edit] |
The LA Times is reporting today on industry efforts to create a directory of cell phone numbers. Industry analysts have been talking about this for months, and are warning that consumers will soon be seeing a lot more telemarketing calls and SMS spam on their cell phones.
Let me state for the record that I find telemarketing to be every bit as much of a nuisance as email spam. Worse, in some ways, because it wastes more of my time.
I registered my new home phone number with the national Do-Not-Call list the same day that I set up the account; however, it takes three months for the listing to take effect, and in the mean time, I have been deluged by calls and mail from all of the marketers who got my contact info from the public records of my new mortgage.
It also used to be illegal to use automated calling systems in the state of Georgia. But the industry has gotten that law overturned in recent years, so now you can't even request to have your number removed from a telemarketer's list without being forced to first listen through the entire recorded message.
And here's a question: Why do the phone companies charge a monthly fee for the so-called privelege of having an unlisted number? This is 2004; phone systems are now digital for the most part. Why can't the phone company just set a one-time flag on my record in their database that says "Don't publish" and be done with it? What kind of administrative problems do they have that they need to charge me $4 monthly, $48 annually, to address? Loss of anticipated revenue from phone directory sales, perhaps? Sorry, but that cost should not be passed on to the consumer!
Any way, the mobile telecommunications industry is now in a position to take on the mobile phone privacy issue in a way that works better than their wired predecessors. They are not constrained by the legacy standards and technology of our 100-year-old Bell phone networks. So here is my plea:
- Please make inclusion of mobile numbers in the directory an opt-in process rather than opt-out.
- Please explain the opt-in choice clearly to consumers during the process for setting up a new phone number.
- Please design your internal databases in a way that makes it easy to administer privacy choices. It seems counter-productive to have to run a second, 'Do-Not-Call', database, when you could simply record consumers' privacy preferences in the same place as their account information.
- If you must apply a charge to consumers to defray the costs of administering their privacy preferences, then please, make it a one-time fee and not a monthly charge.
Because I lived for 31 years without a cell phone, and I can do it again, easily, if the cell phone becomes more of a problem than a convenience.
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