Describe your idea: A website to fight back against nuisance and intrusion?
I have signed up to the Telephone Preference Service, but I still get cold calls and I think it is not just against the codes of businesses who have signed up to the Direct Marketing Association (i.e. not all) but against the law. Sometimes I put the phone down, once I tried to have as long a conversation as possible – rack up their phone bill. If you can get the name of the company calling – which they usually say at the outset – then a simple website where you could put in the name could be cross-referenced to company data and a letter generated to ask them to stop – or the name could be submitted to the Information Commissioner.
Perhaps on the same site, you could sign up once to get registered on the three separate preference services – email, mail and telephone. The DMA don’t want to encourage people to sign up – they want to discourage it because it is bad for their members.
What problem does it solve?: Nuisance calls and junk mail
I like this idea, it could be expanded to include an informal system allowing people to record companies ignoring the TPS.
Hi Ed,
We really like this idea. The 5 preference services are complicated and take a significant amount of time to sign up to. There are also companies who do not subscribe to the Direct Marketing Association (the organisation that manages the preference services) and so will not know that you have requested not to receive marketing messages. Over the next few months we will be looking at taking this idea forward for development.
[...] has begin on our next project – StayPrivate.org. The aim of the project is to make it easier to opt out of receiving unwanted marketing [...]
We’ve now started work on this project.
You can see the first stages on the blog: http://www.consumerfocuslabs.org/blog/wireframing-stay-private.
We’ll be tagging all posts related to this under StayPrivate.org, so you can track progress at http://www.consumerfocuslabs.org/tag/stayprivateorg