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March 24, 2005

DoNotCall.gov

Tonight I looked through donotcall.gov, the FTC-operated website where people can register telephone numbers for the Federal do-not-call list. Two observations:

1) There is zero authentication that the person registering a phone number actually is the subscriber for that number. An email authentication process merely confirms that the registrant has a working email address (not sure what purpose this serves). Otherwise, I can freely register telephone numbers of third parties, and the telephone subscriber would not even know that I've made that choice for them. Not exactly industrial-grade authentication.

2) I could not find any discussion anywhere on the site about how to deregister a telephone number. I know that’s because no one asks to do so, but still, the FTC seems to treat registration as a one-way election--easy to get on the registry; hard to get off it. The FTC could easily provide deregistration instructions on the website, and they should do so.

Posted by Eric at March 24, 2005 06:53 PM | Marketing