OT Online vendors want my phone number. DO NOT CALL?

micky · 2013-02-20T23:34:02+00:00

It seems like more and more online vendors want my phone number, and they even make it a required field. Has anyone else noticed this? These are places that sell things for a dollar or 20, not 2000 dollars. For a 2000 item, if something were confused, they'd call me on the phone, but for 10 dollars, they're never going to call me about an order, are they? They'll email. So I'm thinking they want this to get around the Do Not Call list. Here is the relveant part of the Privacy Policy of a vendor I'm looking at now, "Jxxxxx collects information largely to improve our communication with our customers. Occasionally we make some information available to a small selection of third parties who have expressed interest in mailing information about related products or services, but we never share e-mail addresses. " Nothing about telephone numbers. And even wrt email addresses, doesn't "share" mean give a copy to. What's to prevent them from being paid to send an email (text provided to them) to everyone on their email list? That's not sharing addresses, that's sending an additional mailing. (When I ran a hiking club, before email, on a couple occasoins we enclosed with our mailed newsletter a page from a charitable group we all approved of. But even then we didnt' give them a copy of our mailing list. We only did this a couple times, but what prevents a vendor from doing it hundreds of times, having their own set of employees who would call using these phone numbers they've collected, but call for 3rd parties? Is that against the Do Not Call law? Should I make up an invalid phone number and give them that?

Feb 20, 2013 20 Replies

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Thanks. I didn't know that and it was good to read. Even if they didn't get all of them yet, it will give me more things to say to Heather when she calls again. LIke, "Does your father know you do this for money?"

BTW, despite my previous post, I'm not one who thinks the govt. is goofing off when it spends its time on one thing rather than another. I was sort of pointing out that, Though these phone calls aren't the biggest problem I could have that the govt. could help solve, they are t he problem I most want the govt. to solve. Because they are ANNOYING.

I'm certainly not stupid enough to think the president shouldn't play golf once in a while. or that the people at the FTC shouldn't play golf every weekend if they chose, or that that affects how much work gets done.