Monday, October 20, 2008

Do Not Call Lists

Security expert Bruce Schneier has a blog post where he mentions the new Canadian Do Not Call List.  One thing he mentions:
Here's my idea. If you're a company, add every one of your customers to the list. That way, none of your competitors will be able to cold call them.
My question is, couldn't someone write a small program to pull all of the phone numbers in Canada from say Canada411.com and add them all to the Do Not Call List?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to Antica, they monitor for large blocks coming from the same IP, though I'm not sure what they do when they detect it.

Also, Schneier's article claims there are no checks on removal, but that's not quite true: you can't remove a number via the web, and via phone they check the CallerID.

Chris said...

Personally I find the whole thing a bit mystifying. If the government were going to go to all the trouble to deal with telemarketing calls, couldn't they have taken the easier route of either banning the whole thing or making it opt in.