Today is the first day to register for the national do not call list, a program by the FTC to help people to stop getting calls from telemarketers. The site is receiving over 100 requests a second and is slow as a result.
The list will go live on October 1, 2003, requiring all telemarketers to remove you from their call lists. Wired has more on this.
I’ve been anxious for this to come out, but I no longer live at the place I got all the telemarketing calls, and I will now just have my cell phone (on which I don’t get telemarketing calls), so I’m not going to worry about it.
But now when they ask for your home phone you can only give them your cell phone, and they’ll put you on their call list. I haven’t had a home phone in over a year and a half, so I’ve gotten numerous telemarketer calls. I registered on the list, but just found out that, ironically, Yahoo mail is filtering the emails as spam.
The only calls I’ve received on my cell phone are from people who do surveys by calling random numbers and magazine/paper companies that I gave my number to directly. As far as I can tell, it’s never been sold and used for spam-type calls.
That’s right. I heard that on NPR this morning and was going to do it first thing, but forgot. Thanks for the reminder. There’s nothing like given’ the finger to the man (telemarketers).
It says you’ll get the email in a few minutes, but it took several hours to get mine, but I’m now officially on the list. Wahoo!
I’m so happy that this came out,finally !
I’m convinced now that you all are making a joke of this. Not funny. The idea of being on a big “do not call list” is too good to be true. And apparently for me it is as I still haven’t received any email confirmations.
It’s no joke. I gave them two numbers to ban and received two emails. Come October 1st I’ll be able to sue for up to $11,000 if one of the non-excempt telemarketers calls me.