Bye Telemarketing, Hi More Spam?
from the lesser-of-two-evils? dept
With the story yesterday that the FTC was looking at a national do-not-call list comes the predictions that telemarketers will instead turn to spam. The theory is that they'll need to keep getting their message out there, and spam will become the logical next channel for telemarketers blocked from making phone calls. I'm not so sure this is true. As is mentioned in the article, as annoying as telemarketers are, they're actually a slight step up from spammers, and at least seem to have some (if tiny) sense of what is and what is not proper behavior. Blindly spamming might be over the line even for these folks. When I was in high school and needed a job many years ago, I interviewed for a telemarketing job (selling alarm systems, I think). These were clearly not the most ethical of people, but they seemed a lot more legitimate than most spammer operations, which are entirely based on deception.
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Already seen it...
I can understand one time, but three times?
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the many faces of spam
As Monty Python would say...."I don't like spam!!!"
http://www.detritus.org/spam/skit.html
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Re: the many faces of spam
(1) All of the snail mail spam is paid for, and thus limited. It doesn't get worse each week, and you know that someone is paying for each mailing.
(2) The stuf on your computer is (for the most part) from legitimate companies, and there are ways to turn them all off, even if it's difficult to figure out how.
Both of these are somewhat limited, and tend not to interfere with your daily life. Email spam, on the other hand, is more intrusive and more difficult to get around and takes up much more of your day.
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