Stop the robo calling and wasteful spam email

Make it illegal for any company to try to solicit business randomly. Perhaps a selection on a phone where you’re allowing vendors to call you. Perhaps a selection in email or a website where you can indicate that you’re OK with being contacted in the case you’re trying to work with vendors. Ultimately, I cannot even begin to tell you how many hours are wasted running to the phone picking up the phone trying to block emails trying to block callers. It’s a waste of time and no doubt has an impact on economy. We need to have some kind of global switch or if we are wanting to be contacted, we can switch it on or switch it off.

11 Likes

I agree. We have ads everywhere, That’s enough. I would propose we add no more snail mail fliers either.

4 Likes

Agreed. This might be considered borderline harassment. It is one thing to display an advertisement in a public space in order to attract new customers, but it is entirely different when businesses intentionally distract massive numbers of people without former voluntary consent; triggering seemingly-unending ring tones and alerts while leveraging technological tools and indiscriminate methods in their quest for new customers. By using high-frequency calling, these robo-calling businesses create the following adverse impacts on the general population:

  1. Large numbers of people within target areas of robo-call lists are suddenly distracted from current tasks, often taking out time to retrieve and examine communications devices and answer telephone calls from auto-dialer machines; thereby redirecting normal productive time and energy away from current tasks, causing a drain on natural human resource output for the targeted area.

  2. Frequent distractions of continuous calls by overlapping and competing robo-callers divert attention from ongoing critical or dangerous tasks, which may increase the overall incidents of personal harm or serious accidents.

  3. Robocalling is not sensitive to human needs and can deeply impact quality of life, including call generations at hours normally devoted to human rest, and healthy sleep cycles (REM sleep).

  4. The robocalling industry is very energy-expensive, requiring high resource consumption from both local and regional carriers, as well as individual people. Overlapping robocalling is a highly expensive, low-profit practice. When telephone and wireless providers are expected to send vast numbers of call attempts across their network, they have to pay for those energy expenses over time. These increased energy costs are generally passed on disproportionally to their customers, instead of, to those employing robocall systems. As well, the customers must also recharge their phone more frequently, at their own expense, to cover the additional costs that robocallers inflict upon them. Frequent recharges also reduce battery life for portable communications devices and costs consumers in the end for premature cell phone and laptop end-of-life failures. Same with email spam.

  5. Robocallers, as a nusance industry, creates a privacy-destroying, inefficient, and intrusive secondary market for datamining of existing customer bases in other industries and sectors, encouraging these other businesses to over-collect extensive private information on their customers in an effort to later sell that data to outside parties, which are oftentimes Robocallers. Same with email spam.

  6. Interesting proposal to force regulation of this mass-marketing nusance industry. Perhaps we might classify robo-marketing and spamming as a specialized form of advertising, which might fall under the FCC, where regulations might apply to this sort of indiscriminate public-facing customer reach.

Unrelated Side Note: Perhaps another FCC policy proposal might include a restriction on advertising that intentionlly uses concerning/alarming noises to draw their audiences, including default phone ring tones and text message receipts, emergency vehicle sirens, door ajar and other car alarm audio signals, car horns, emergency broadcast tones, door knocking/ pounding/ slamming, human screams, gun shots, etc. There are millions of ways to get an audience’s attention without resorting to false alarms and “startle tactics”. It is very similar in nature to the old adage that “Screaming ‘Fire’ in a movie theater is not a form of protected speech.” I don’t think it provides any “slippery slopes” for the First Amendment. Just an idea.

I hope the above points drive home just how much America is adversely impaced by robocalling and spam emails. It could be better regulated, as it drains American productivity, safety, and energy resources in the long run, for very little return. My two cents. :sunglasses:

4 Likes

I agree. Some of these entites come from oversea organizations.

I also have a similar policy for fraud overseas:

3 Likes

We need to make selling email and personal information by one company to another an opt-in rather than opt-out choice. The burden should not be on the reader to figure out how to opt out of having ones personal info sold or shared. It should only be done if you have opted in.

3 Likes

Makes sense…and in order to provide greater transparency in the secondary data market exchange, perhaps it should understood that the business who is selling the information to a third party, must actually make a clear and obvious compensation for making a profit on the customer’s data, by rewarding the customer, either as a monatery payment, rewards that have monatery value, or by discounts in goods and services provided, as well as clearly defined notation within a user’s account, membership, etc. that the customer is actively participating in this datamining exchange. Conversely, the business can no longer imbed the permission in fine print and attach it to some condition of expected activity like “upon purchaseing a product or service”, or “upon creation of an account” or any other activity that is normally expected of all of its potentional customers. Perhaps this additional info might be combined with yours to create a more structured form of transparency for said datamining agreements/conditions/activities. Thanks.