Do-Not-Call List not working: I’m Shocked….Not!

Canada launched their much touted Do-Not-Call list a couple of years ago to much fanfare.  The Government said this would be a great addition to the regular tools that the average citizen has, to stop unwanted callers from contacting them.  Further investigation into the fine print said that the Do-Not-Call list was exempt for charities, political parties, banks, collection agencies, religious groups, and just about everyone else under the sun.

I laughed at this, having been in privacy management for 20 years, because in the end, the only people you could really put on the Do-Not-Call list were family members.

Now a year or so into the program, Percy Downe a Canadian Senator from Prince Edward Island, was shocked to discover that the program doesn’t work and has actually made the problem worse. He was contacted by a few people about getting put on the Do-Not-Call list and he was more than happy to put them in contact with the right people. He then found out a few months later, that the calls to these people were happening more often then before they signed up and that these people regretted him ever getting them on the Do-Not-Call list to being with. He began investigating the Do-Not-Call list and found out that $73,000 in fines had been issued against certain companies, but only $250 dollars of those fines had been paid or collected. He also found out that the Government has been selling the list to whomever wants to buy the list and those people are using it like a telephone book of contacts across Canada.

This doesn’t shock me one bit. One thing that most government leaders hate to do nowadays is to go after corporate heads and organizations that may be paying for their next election campaigns and the second is to try to make things harder for those companies to do business. The one thing these elected officials seem to forget is that these laws are being requested by their voters and constituents and not by big business. They were supposed to be designed to protect the little people and constituents and ensure companies ran in a legitimate and legal manner. It seems that most of the laws have been tweaked to ensure the consumer gets screwed and that the companies prosper.

This program would be relatively easy to fix and the first thing they need to do is to get rid of all the exceptions and secondly, quit selling the list. Mind you that would be a simple fix and we know how the Governments of the world love simple fixes.

<Read the article here>

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