Interrobang's Journal: Obscene, But Still Probably Legal

Hey, does anyone have a copy of the CRTC regulations regarding telemarketers handy? I just picked up the ringing phone to have someone ask for a facsimile of my boss' name (the last name was wrong by one letter), then ask me for my name, then launch into a spiel about AT&T Wireless service. A bloody telemarketer, calling our office! When I interrupted and said, "Excuse me, this is a business," the person on the other end said, "Yes, we are offering a B2B [sic] service," and then sounded mighty affronted when I said, "Excuse me, I'm really not interested in listening to this, goodbye."

Now, I know some of you folks out there take telemarketing jobs out of circumstance or necessity, but fergodssakes! Calling someone in the middle of the afternoon to harass them on company time is really, really low. Get some self-respect! Go on Welfare or something! (Yes, I know how that sounds. Truth in reporting: I've done both, Welfare and telemarketing. I've been on Welfare twice...and I will never, ever telemarket again, even if it means starving in the street [unlikely].)

Granted, telemarketing scum aren't as low as people who work for collection agencies (I haven't yet been able to figure out any motivations there), but still... I also have to wonder who was the brilliant genius who came up with the idea of cold-calling businesses. Can we invoice them for lost time? Perhaps that would get them to stop.

Excuse me, I have to go clean the junk-o-faxen out of my fax-inbox. Rrrrr...marketing scum intrusions on my work time...

Lesser of evils

[Yosemite Sue]

Hmmm ... this may not be a popular POV, but if I had to choose between telemarketing and collection agency calls, I think I'd choose the latter.

Don't get me wrong - they both would suck, and are pretty low on my list of "jobs-I-would-do-if-I-had-to". The actual duties would be unpleasant, and the collection agency type calls would likely be more unpleasant in nature than the telemarketing. (I don't actually know, since I've never received one of the collection calls, thank goodness!)

However ... IMHO, a telemarketer is bothering someone who is basically innocent. The time-suck and irritation is unwarranted. In the case of collection calls, the call is a direct result of someone not paying their bills. Avoiding collection calls is simply a matter of not being a deadbeat.

The minute moral difference there is what would make the collection agency position the lesser of two evils for me ... But I do hope that I would never have to make such a choice!

Just my $.02 (CDN).

YS

The ends don't justify the means

[Interrobang]

Well, sometimes you get a choice about whether or not you can pay your bills; sometimes you do not... (Yes, impossible situations happen.) I've had collections calls before, and collections folks are invariably rude, nasty, and tap-dance just on the permissible side of what's legal. They're trained specifically so they can not-quite-threaten you over the phone; enough to intimidate most people, but not quite enough to actually break the law -- that's what's so scummy about the job. (Some of them do break the law, but it's hard to prove.)

Personally, I would rather telemarket than work in collections. At least telemarketing is usually beyond sniffing distance of the illegal. The "moral difference" of whether the person "deserves" the call or not (yeah, tell me again why I got called by a collection agency for $7 and change because the phone company screwed up its acc'ts receivable database, or why I got called about my student loan because the bank didn't bother to send the appropriate paperwork I'd asked for) doesn't make much of a difference to me; as far as I'm concerned, the ends do not justify the means.

Free stress relief

[perfessor multigeek]

Well, as some of you have experienced here on /., I have long held to a policy of using things that piss me off as opportunities for stress relief. I figure that if they've done something sleazy (or on /. , just adamantly cognitively lazy), then they're pretty much handing me a proportionate budget of beat-up-on-'em time.
Now, I too have done my time in cubicle hell, selling Weekly Reader to the folks in West Dogpatch, so telemarketing per se doesn't mean that I'll utterly whale on 'em, but if they insist on staying on the line or if they (much worse) leave me multiple messages even after I've said that I'm not interested, then I'm prone to start asking them questions.
"So tell me, what long distance service do you use? Are you happy with it?"
"That's an interesting special offer. Does it still apply if gravity becomes variable? How about if I use the extra cell phone minutes to start a Satanic cult?"
"Have you included Planck's Constant and its effect on the Gregorian calendar? Shouldn't that entitle me to an extra month of free delivery?"
"Before we go any further, could you please give me your full name, birth date and social security number - for statistical purposes only."
It only takes a few such questions to shoo just about any teleparasite off the line. And if not? Cool! I can get my jollies for a good half hour or more doing this sort of thing.

Back when I was in college I lived in an apartment, the phone number of which had been mistakenly printed on the letterhead of a local church. Previous tenants had repeatedly complained and we even offered to set a free new hed for them (using this then new thing called a "laser printer") but they just would not deal with it.
So, we started answering the phone "Sellwood United Methodist Church!" and anybody who had called thinking that we were they would be given detailed information about when services would be, whether the pastor was in that day, or whatever. All made up at the moment. We alternated between sounding very strait-laced and giving answers like "Tonight's service will be held at midnight. Bring a goat!"
The scary thing is that this problem predated my moving in and as of a year later, they *still* had not corrected their masthead. But until they did, they'ld be providing entertainment to an ever shifting population of college students.

The tale is told that a DC pizza parlor misprinted a stack of mailers with the number for Ted Kennedy's office instead of their own. When the Senator's office called them to explain the error and say that they were getting a little sick of redirecting hundreds of calls, they were told that mailers cost money and the pizza place would get around to it when they got around to it.
Evidently (given all the free lawyers on tap) the Kennedy office contemplated things like suing or getting permits revoked but finally settled on something better. Ted K's people did a little research into the pizza parlor in question so that they would have their facts right and set out to *ahem* shift the dynamic. Each and every person who called for reservations was told that they were the ten-thousandth customer and would get a free dinner for ten people. All they had to do was inform the manager who they were when they got their bill. They would then be given the actual name of the manager, where he could be found, etc. People who called for deliveries were told that *they* were the 10K customer and that their food would arrive in twenty minutes, be free, and come with a free additional pie.
The flyers were swiftly corrected.

As far as I'm concerned, when an institution starts infringing inappropriately on my life, I will feel free to use that time as *I* see fit. Think of it as negative reenforcement. (Well, I admit it; for me it's mostly free giggle time without guilt.)

Rustin

PIPEDA

[RhetoricalQuestion]

For Canadian businesses, PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) is your new best friend in this. It's on http://privcom.gc.ca If I remember correctly, Schedule A spells out the 10 rights on which the law is based.

All Federal private businesses have had to comply with PIPEDA since 2001. Provincial businesses must comply in 2004 -- which gives the provinces time to develop their own PIPEDA-like laws. If the provinces do no do so, the federal standard will apply.

Under PIPEDA, you have the right to:

• Find out what personal information any company has about you, and find out exactly what it's being used for and why.
• Find out where a company got your personal information from.
• Revoke consent at any time for uses or storage of personal information that is not required for the business transaction or after the transaction is complete.*
• Complain about violations of privacy and have this looked into and responded to in a timely manner.

To support this, companies are required to:

• Display their privacy policies clearly.
• Have a company privacy officer to look into all these complaints.
• Maintain responsibility for personal information that they collect from you, even when this information is given/stored/used by another company.**
• Provide reasonable security to protect your personal information.

It's a good law. It's designed to strike a balance between the individual's right to privacy and a business's need for information -- with the assumption that what happens to your personal information should be under your control.

I have used it to stop many a telemarketer -- particularly since Bell claims that if you list your number in your phone book, it's public so selling the database of phone numbers is okay, since someone could crawl through the phone book. Which I think violates the spirit of PIPEDA, since 1) private numbers cost extra and 2) I see a big difference between going through the phone book and buying the database. (Though actually, Bell doesn't sell it. Cornerstone, a database marketing company, sells the info it gets from ActivMedia, who maintains the Bell phone book database.) I challenged this early on in PIPEDA's implementation and got my name removed from the Cornerstone database, but left my number in the phone book. They may have a defined policy around this now, which I intend to challenge as soon as I get around to calling in about it. (I had more time in 2001.)

Doesn't help you so much with American companies, but it's a good one to know and use. And hey -- if you find yourself getting turned down for a loan, this means your credit history cannot be kept secret from you. You have the right to know what information about you they used.

* Example: A company needs your credit card number when it processes a transaction, but it doesn't need to store it for a year later. Rogers Cable needs to store your home address to send bills, but it doesn't need to know your occupation or income level.

** Example: Bell Canada takes your information and hands it to a different company (ActivMedia) to print and manage the phone book. Bell is still responsible for ActivMedia's use of your information, since Bell was the one who collected it.

I *liked* telemarketing

[Tet]

So shoot me. But when I was at University, I took a part time job selling double glazing for a telemarketing company. I have to say that compared to packing apples, or some of the other part time jobs I took, I loved telemarketing. We had a great bunch of people, and a lot of fun. Is it unethical? Not particularly. Anyone is free to hang up, and if you don't want random people calling, then make your number X directory. Even if you do have your number made public, just register the number with the telephone preference service, and you won't get any telemarketing calls.