Video Game Industry Has A Blind Spot To Females >>
<< Mississippi Students Build Their Own PCs
 tdicon 


Predictions

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Dec 19th 2002 7:55am





Bye Telemarketing, Hi More Spam?

from the lesser-of-two-evils? dept

With the story yesterday that the FTC was looking at a national do-not-call list comes the predictions that telemarketers will instead turn to spam. The theory is that they'll need to keep getting their message out there, and spam will become the logical next channel for telemarketers blocked from making phone calls. I'm not so sure this is true. As is mentioned in the article, as annoying as telemarketers are, they're actually a slight step up from spammers, and at least seem to have some (if tiny) sense of what is and what is not proper behavior. Blindly spamming might be over the line even for these folks. When I was in high school and needed a job many years ago, I interviewed for a telemarketing job (selling alarm systems, I think). These were clearly not the most ethical of people, but they seemed a lot more legitimate than most spammer operations, which are entirely based on deception.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...
 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1.  

    Already seen it...

    identicon
    Oliver Wendell Jones, Dec 19th, 2002 @ 10:37am

    I signed up for my state's (Indiana) don't call list. I've already received the same e-mail 3 times from the State Attorney General's office about the upcoming federal legislation and how it might over-rule our state's laws and may not be as good as the system we have now.

    I can understand one time, but three times?

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    the many faces of spam

    identicon
    rob, Dec 19th, 2002 @ 6:54pm

    Why do people only complain about email spam? What about the twice a week bundles of spam advertisements in your snail-mail box? What about the "free" local advertisements newspaper that is thrown in every driveway in the neighborhood each week? What about the spam embedded in new PCs you just paid $1500 for, like the Norton anti-virus pop-up sales pitch each time you reboot, or windows messenger in WinXP? What about the Flash download box that pops up every mouseclick of a flash-laden webpage that you cannot just say no to once and that is the end of it. Why are telemarketers supposed to by law allow you to opt off their lists but no such requirements are imposed on other spam.

    As Monty Python would say...."I don't like spam!!!"
    http://www.detritus.org/spam/skit.html

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: the many faces of spam

    icon
    Mike (profile), Dec 19th, 2002 @ 7:29pm

    First off, there are those who would argue that those other things are just as bad. However, there are some differences:

    (1) All of the snail mail spam is paid for, and thus limited. It doesn't get worse each week, and you know that someone is paying for each mailing.

    (2) The stuf on your computer is (for the most part) from legitimate companies, and there are ways to turn them all off, even if it's difficult to figure out how.

    Both of these are somewhat limited, and tend not to interfere with your daily life. Email spam, on the other hand, is more intrusive and more difficult to get around and takes up much more of your day.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Save me a cookie
  • Note: A CRLF will be replaced by a break tag (<br>), all other allowable HTML will remain intact
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>


Video Game Industry Has A Blind Spot To Females >>
<< Mississippi Students Build Their Own PCs
 tdicon 

A word from our Sponsors...
Follow Techdirt
Flattr rss rss

Powered by Postrank

From the Techdirt Archive...
A word from our Sponsors...

Close

Email This