Advocates and
Social /
Scientific and Commercial Market Researchers!
Minister Helen Coonan has a promising proposal for a Do Not Call
Register to properly protect people from telemarketing:
http://www.dcita.gov.au/tel/do_not_call
Submissions were due by 30
November 2005.
My submission is at: 2005/DNC-Robin-Whittle-2005-11-30.html
This is a potentially
excellent
system, but there are many details to get right to make sure it
properly controls telemarketing, without creating privacy and security
problems for those who want to be protected. To do this, the
system must be more sophisticated and more encompassing than any Do Not
Call register so far devised.
I think that there should
be protection for those who do not want to get Social / Scientific or
Commercial Market Research calls, but that the low level of these calls
makes a governent regulatory approach more trouble than the problem it
is designed to solve. So I advocate self-regulation for research
calls, ideally in two categories. Whatever happens, we much
ensure that all types of telemarketing call are properly regulated for
all telephone users, and that research calls
are not caught up in the net which is intended to catch telemarketing
calls. |