| Comment Number: | OL-112679 |
| Received: | 1/3/2005 10:14:00 PM |
| Organization: | |
| Commenter: | Steven Annan |
| State: | CA |
| Subject: | Trade Regulation Rule on Telemarketing Sales |
| Title: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| CFR Citation: | 16 CFR Part 310 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
Please put a stop to automated calls--they are a total nuisance and rarely if ever have any valuable info to offer. Advertising should be discretionary on the part of the recipient: I can ignore a billboard, change the channel if the ads are obnoxious, turn a magazine page. But a ringing phone cannot be ignored--it might be an important call. An answering machine can screen a live call (whose caller will likely hang up if unanswered by a live recipient) but a prerecorded one will drone on anyway--there is no way to make it go away! Inasmuch as most of us have both phones and front doors, allowing prerecorded calls to pester us is as much an invasion of privacy as mandating that we leave our front door unlocked and allow to enter anyone who wants to present a sales pitch (even a robot). An alternative to make such calls more fair would be bill the callers for the time. The call would be timed as usual by the phone company and a chargeback made, perhaps in the form of a credit to the listener's phone bill, charged to the advertiser at a rate of, say, 50 cents to 1.00 per minute. That would make the callers limit their calls to truly interested individuals, and those individuals, in turn, might not be inconvenienced but enlightened. phone bill