Businessweek has an article on junk phone calls and reports that for a variety of reasons junk callers may start calling cell phones more often.
Soon after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implements its wireless number portability rules on Nov. 24, it's expected that most phone customers will also be able to keep the same number when they switch from regular landline to wireless service. And as that happens, telemarketers almost certainly will start reaching people via their mobile phones.
This is a problem that calls out for neat technological solutions. One idea would be for cell phone and regular phone companies to offer phone number blacklist and whiltelist access control services similar to what a variety of services now offer for controlling spam email.
In the simplest blacklist case one could sign up one's phone number to not allow calls from some list of phone numbers that an organization maintained as being a junk phone call marketer list. Different organizations could compete to maintain different lists. A phone company could provide several to choose from that a customer could assign to one's own phone number account. Any phone number on the list that you assign to your phone number would not be allowed to call thru if attempting to call your phone number. You'd simply never get the call.
A cell phone company could even provide personalized blacklists per customer. There'd be ads that sounded like "Not only do you get 4000 anytime minutes but we also give you a 100 entry personal phone number blacklist.". Upon receiving a telemarketer call you could hit a button on your cell phone that indicates you never want to get a call from that number again. That has uses for reasons that go beyond junk callers. It would be great for avoiding the calls of old boyfriends and girlfriends or cranks.
Another option would be whitelists. Instead of choosing lists of calling numbers to block thru you'd choose lists of numbers to allow thru. This could be done at a personal level or with big organization approved whitelists. There could be a white list that is for all government agencies. There could be another for public and private schools. There could be one for residential phone numbers since most junk calls come from business phone numbers.
The gradual decline in the cost of phone calls and for automated dialing systems and voice recording systems is only going to lower the cost for telemarketers to make calls. They will be able to do so internationally and therefore their abuses will become harder to stop with laws. We need technological means to control who gets access to our own personal time.
Another neat feature would be the ability to quickly change your level of filter for different types of calls. If you are going to be driving and don't want to get non-emergency calls you could set your cell phone to "High Priority Only". That could mean to switch to your shorter whitelist rather than your longer whitelist. There could even be different whitelists for different times of the day or days of the week. Also, there could be whitelists and blacklists that have different actions to do in response to a call. For some the caller might get a message saying that they are blocked permanently. For other entries they'd get shuffled to voice mail. For still other callers they'd get told to call back after 6 PM or only on weekdays during business hours.
Phone companies that started offering these services would have a competitive advantage over those who didn't. They coud charge extra for different levels and kinds of filtering abilities. There are plenty of obvious variations that could be implemented on the ideas outlined above. Companies could compete on how they identify junk callers of various types, how they categorize the various types, how easy they make it to review and change filter settings, and how many levels and kinds of services they offer. If implemented first for landline phones then the landline companies would increase the appeal of landline accounts over cell phone accounts. Given that it is going to become possible to switch a landline phone number to a cell phone the desireability for cell phones to have this kind of service looks set to increase.
Duncan Watts of Columbia and coworkers have repeated Stanley Migram's famous 6 degrees of separation study of 1967 by having people send email to someone they didn't know by sending it to someone who might know a person closer to the intended target. The internet has not decreased the number of degrees of separation between people.
When the researchers asked people why they did not participate, less than 1 percent replied that they could not think of anyone to send the e-mail message to, suggesting that most simply did not want to be bothered.
Thus, the researchers assumed that many more of the e-mail chains could have been completed. They calculated that half of them would have been finished in five steps or less if the first sender and the target lived in the same country, and seven steps otherwise.
Let me reword this: if only people were not so indifferent to requests they get from distant acquaintances we'd all be able to reach anyone in 6 steps. Well, news flash for the people who did this study: we are lucky that most people will not forward mail along in big chain mailings because spam junk mail is already a big enough problem as it is.
The original experiment by Milgram used physical mailing of packages.
The founding experiment in the science of social networks was performed in 1967. Stanley Milgram of Harvard University asked randomly selected people in Omaha, Nebraska, to send packages to a Boston stockbroker identified only by his name, occupation and rough location.
The first experiment required a far larger amount of effort on the part of those who were intermediaries.
Watts doesn't think the internet is generating a lot of new ties.
"In this experiment, the internet is simply the tool we use to transmit messages," Watts told New Scientist, in an email. "Compared with offline interactions like work, school, family, and community, I don't see email as being a particularly compelling medium for generating social ties."
I think that for some subpopulations the internet is creating many new bonds. There are people who are finding lovers and even future spouses on the internet. Also, some people are getting to know others virtually who wouldn't otherwise know each other. Plus, it is making it a lot easier to stay in contact with old friends or to find them again.
Melbourne travel agent Sally Stansmore, 32, was one of the 18 targets, which included a US university lecturer, an archival inspector in Estonia, an IT consultant in India, a Norwegian veterinarian and a Kalgoorlie policeman.
She said the 40 messages she received came mainly from people she knew well and "a few blasts from the past". She did not know where the email chains had originated. "Usually, I'd only know the last two (contacts)," she said.
But the connections that matter more are connections to powerful people.
Also, Watts said that people who were only remote acquaintances played an important role in the successful chains. That's because close friends tend to know the same people and have the same contacts, while more distant acquaintances are more apt to bring in new contacts unknown to the searcher.
One thing this study doesn't measure is whether or not people are more likely to be connected to others who share their own interests. Is the internet enabling relationship networks to be sorted more efficiently along the lines of common interests and beliefs?
Work acquaintances were more likely to pass along a message.
"Successful chains - in comparison with incomplete chains - disproportionately involved professional ties rather than friendship and familial relationships. Successful chains were also more likely to entail links that originated through work or higher education," the authors wrote.
Men passed messages more frequently to other men, and women to other women. This tendency to pass messages to a same-sex contacts was strengthened by about 3% if the target was the same gender as the sender and similarly weakened in the opposite case, the researchers found.
Another interesting result of the study was that highly social individuals who had large sets of acquaintances seem to be poor choices for sending messages to. It could be that they are too busy to send on messages. Or perhaps they are the center of an insular group.
The US government's new National Do Not Call Registry has begun operation. If you know you want to sign up then go directly to the registration page. Note that you can register up to 3 phone numbers at a time.
If you reigster by the end of August 2003 then the telemarketers will stop calling by September 1, 2003. Note that charitable organizations soliciting for donations are not covered but you can ask each organization not to call you again after the first call and they must respect this request. Also, people conducting political polls and other surveys are not covered.
If only junk email spam was as easy to get get rid of...