Sample Letter to the Federal Trade Commision: Oppose Pre-Recorded Telemarketing Calls
VMBC petitioned the Commission to amend the TSR to allow prerecorded telemarketing calls to consumers when the caller has a claimed business relation. If accepted, an EBR exception for prerecorded sales calls would have created a major loophole, opening the door for a dramatic increase in unwanted calls to consumers who had placed their telephone numbers on the national Do-Not-Call (DNC) Registry.
Did you put your telephone number on the national Do-Not-Call Registry (DNC), but still get sales calls from companies you’ve never heard of? Quite likely many unwanted sales calls you get today are not made by a live person. Instead many companies use auto-dialers, programmed to start a recorded message the minute you answer the phone. But, the calls that probably really get your dander up are the “dead air” calls, when you run to catch the phone but are met with silence.
It may not seem like common sense to clean your trash before you throw it away, but with technology that is exactly what you should do.
Before you sell, donate or trash your cell phone, make sure that your personal information has been permanently deleted. For most phones, this means more than resetting the phone. Although resetting the phone may appear to delete your information, recent reports suggest that software programs can retrieve the information if it was not properly deleted.
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC)1 appreciates the opportunity to comment, opposing ACA International's (ACA)2 Petition. The ACA asks the Federal Communications Commission (FCC or Commission) to exempt debt collectors from cell phone privacy rules adopted under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).3 We urge the Commission to deny this Petition.
Debt collectors want permission to call your cell phone. They want to use autodialers in order to reach as many numbers as possible.
The law currently protects consumers from such calls to cell phones, but the debt collectors want that to change.
Consumers expect that their telephone calling records will remain private and unavailable to third parties without the customer's knowledge and authorization. Yet, it is clear that this expectation is unrealistic, evidenced by the findings in the Petition for Rulemaking submitted to the Commission by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).3
EPIC's Petition as well as recent news reports, state and federal legislative proposals, and government lawsuits against data brokers all point to a disturbing situation: Not only are current safeguards for customer calling records inadequate, but those that exist are being blatantly ignored.
Most of us assume that our phone records are private. Despite mounting legal battles, information brokers on the Internet continue to offer the name and address connected to a cell phone number, an individual's phone number, even the complete record of outgoing and incoming phone calls.
Like so many emails these days you can't believe everything that comes into your inbox. A recent example of some of the half truths contained in well-intentioned emails includes the following which has been making the rounds on the Internet:
For years intrusive, privacy invasive telemarketing calls have been a major source of consumer outrage. Calls made by so-called “predictive” dialers -- automatic dialing that allows a telemarketer to call multiple households at one time -- have been a significant consumer complaint. Such calls are intrusive, invade the privacy of one’s home, and result in great annoyance when one races to answer the phone to find only dead air or a hang-up on the other end of the line. Predicative dialer calls are particularly troublesome and potentially dangerous for the elderly and the disabled.
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