Hmmmm….

Simon Davies rails against automated marketing calls.

Like millions of people across Britain, I now refuse to answer my home landline number, and with good justification. I am plagued night and day by relentless and unwelcome marketing calls.

It seems almost every call to my landline now comes from an automated dialler machine, offering me one or other deal in a “government-backed scheme” to reduce my debt, or increase my credit. They come thick and fast; uninvited recorded voices reciting a generic script. Sometimes there are a dozen or more a day.

I used to enjoy the intimacy of my home phone line. Unlike my mobile number, which is known to thousands of people, my home number was the exclusive domain of only the trusted and loved few – people who really matter to me and to whom my life is open. Not now. I don’t even bother giving it to my family and closest friends. It is an outgoing call line only.

While I tend to agree with his sentiments – these calls are an intrusive nuisance, I can also attest that during my last few years in the UK, I stopped these calls pretty much dead. The telephone preference service works well. Once I registered our UK landline number, marketing calls fell off dramatically. By the time I left just over a year ago, it was rare to receive a call from anyone we had not specifically given our number to. Those odd few were dealt with by filtering calls using the answering machine. If it was a genuine caller, they understood what we were doing and started to leave a message and one of us would pick up. Anyone else was left to leave a message or not as they wished.

Since moving to France, we do get the odd sales call. We have registered with the list orange. Again, we filter calls. 

I’m not sure that I agree with Simon Davies when he says that this is a privacy issue. A nuisance, yes, but not an invasion of privacy.

In terms of sheer numbers of people affected, this issue is emerging as the most significant privacy problem of the year.

This is a Denial of Service attack on the entire national phone network, and nothing is being done about it. We pay for a phone line that can be used as a personal means of communication, not a marketing device to be exploited by companies. And yet regulators have taken the view that commercial entities have a right to intrude in whatever way they wish.

Frankly, I think that he is overstating it – this is not a matter for regulation. Filter the calls, go ex-directory and register with a preference service and the calls dry up.

It seems adding your number to the “Do Not Call” list on the Telephone Preference Service makes little difference.

Actually, yes, it does.

While I used to be annoyed by these calls, I was also aware that my landline number (unlike my mobile number) was published in the telephone directory and was, therefore, in the public domain. Here, I am inclined to agree with Davies:

Part of the problem can be traced to the historic position of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) that phone numbers are not personal information. That position may have been tenable 20 years ago, but not now.

Which is why there was such a negative reaction recently when a mobile directory was proposed (interestingly, this is still unavailable).

The way to deal with this is much the same way as we deal with SPAM – keep our details out of the public eye and give them only to those who need to know.

So while I agree that telemarketing is an obnoxious practice and those who do it deserve to die horrible, painful deaths, it is one that is relatively easily dealt with, using TPS, answering machines and even auto filtering systems, why use a thermonuclear devise to swat a fly? So, yes, don’t answer, if that is the way you want to deal with it. But getting government involved is pretty much always going to be a very, very bad idea. I would have thought Davies would be aware of that one already.