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posted by mrpg on Monday June 05 2017, @01:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-call-is-important-to-us dept.

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Frank Kemp was working on his computer when his cellphone let out the sound of Mario — from Super Mario Bros. — collecting a coin. That signaled he had a new voice mail message, yet his phone had never rung.

"At first, I thought I was crazy," said Mr. Kemp, a video editor in Dover, Del. "When I checked my voice mail, it made me really angry. It was literally a telemarketing voice mail to try to sell telemarketing systems."

Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses. The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them.

Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.

But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers' voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother's nursing home or a child's school.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:21PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @04:21PM (#520826)

    I don't understand why it is that the government has so much power in this area; could it be because the government established monopolies around the flow of telecommunications data? I THINK SO!

    Tell me, where was your kind advice when we were all dealing with email spam all these years? Well, you never even thought about the government, because it was just a technological problem, not a political problem.

    If you need government to step in and establish a technological problem through political means, then you done fucked up!

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 05 2017, @05:14PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday June 05 2017, @05:14PM (#520843)

    The reason the government needs to be involved is that tracking down the bad guys involves an amount of data sharing between phone carriers that they probably aren't willing to do on their own. Because trade secrets and NDAs and such.

    I should also point out that email spam hasn't gone away. It's just gotten less annoying because the filtering tools have gotten better. The classic anti-spam plan checklist [craphound.com] still has a lot of applicability.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday June 05 2017, @05:15PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday June 05 2017, @05:15PM (#520847) Journal

    Note though that spam is an ongoing problem. Apparently the government free way to deal with it is just put up with it?!?