The “Mobile Informational Call Act” is an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 and will allow political organizations, committees, and action groups to contact you on your mobile phone. The new bill…would allow political organizations to use automated dialers and robocall-systems to dial your cell phone and hand you off to a live person or play automated messages asking you to contribute to political campaigns or take surveys.
The result, should the bill pass and become law, is that you’ll be able to opt-out of specific campaigns and group calling lists, but political organizations that get your number through petitions, calling lists, or affiliated organizations will be able to call your mobile phone whenever they choose.
With the fall political campaign heating up and next year’s campaign starting over a year early, that can add up to a lot of unsolicited phone calls from various campaigns and political action committees, all looking for your help or money…
That includes you being charged for the minutes used.
As always, the best thing to do is contact your congressional representatives and let them know that you oppose the bill and would like them to oppose the bill as well. The National Political Do Not Contact Registry has a petition that you can sign to make your opposition to the bill known to your specific representatives…
Beyond signing the petition, standard rules for contacting your Congressional representatives apply: even if you sign the petition, you’ll have the most success if you reach out to your specific representatives and senators with a personal message (the petition linked to above allows you to personalize the message you send for this purpose).
Congress-critters are getting hip to the cyberworld. Some of them can even send and receive their own email without clicking on the link to Nigeria. Now, the self-serving creeps want you to pay for a new intrusion.
Thanks, Ursarodinia
I’ve already gotten calls on my pre-paid phone telling me to vote for Walter Jones, congresscritter at large, more than a year ago.
also known as…
guess who i WILL NOT vote for…
i have done this already…getting robo calls, i waited on the phone long enough to learn who it was losing my vote
My cell displays the name and number of whoever is calling.
It also gives different ring tones depending on who’s is calling.
A perfect ring tone for anybody I don’t already know is complete silence…
If I don’t know you, you shouldn’t bother calling.
My email has spam filters as well.
I vote that we put political organizations, committees, and action groups on the RoboFaceKicking list.
Everything should be “opt-in”. I’m tired of opt out and spam calls where the caller id number does not even ring when returned so you can give them a piece of your mind (peace of your mind?).
People don’t buy cell phone to get spammed. I can’t imagine the cell phone industry going along with this.
Yeah, right… Like the cell phone companies are going to take a stand against getting more minutes tacked onto your bill.
Get an expensive 900 number routed to your mobile phone – ideally $100 per call + $1 per 10 seconds of call duration. And when they call, talk to the caller at length about every issue you can think of.
Well, Obama was planning to spend $1bn on his reelection – nothing wrong with scoring some of that stash for yourself 😀
I like the way you think!
As others noted this can back fire a huge way with irate voters voting no!
I like the silent ring tone feature. That is clever.
Robocall me once shame on you
Robocall me twice
and I’ll return the favor to your local re-election office
soooooooooooooo
make sure you robo call your elected “official” and let them know how displeased you are!
:p
It’s about time to install captcha on phones… If you are human, press 1.
Maybe they can robocall Dvorak to remove this god-awful site layout!
Why do I have to click to read the article. Where’s the preview? Are we going back to the old site yet?
Eideard, I’m guessing you’ve been voting a couple of decades and should know better. If you’ve been voting R or D, then YOU are responsible for the “congress-critters” and the mess.
They don’t elect themselves.
It does cost you one minute of time. At the 600+ odd minutes I pay for per month, I use less than 200. If it is a call I am not interested in, then I hang up and I lose at most one or two minutes.
This has nothing to do with calling your cell to get your vote/money, -and everything to do with racking up dead minute$ for the telecom vampires. -getting you to actually vote (or bend over) is the bonus.
-s
I noticed the comment at the end of the story which said; Now, the self-serving creeps want you to pay for a new intrusion.
What I’d like to know is who or what is watching things now? Cause it’s already happening! I can tell you from my own personal experience too. (What rock were you under?)
I don’t think there are very many people with a phone who haven’t got a phone call from one of these annoying automated machines. I sometimes get them three times a day telling me stuff like how I can lower my credit card bills. And they call despite my number being on any “no call” list(s) and despite me not having any outstanding debt either.
The low-life marketeers will have their machines call cause they know they can get away with it and even make a profit if just one person out of a thousand responds favorably too. And for that, you really have to blame big business! Cause in case you didn’t know, big business pays big bucks to anyone who can bring them new sheep -er- customers.
So what I’d like to know is who is in charge of enforcing our already existing telephone laws? And why isn’t any government entity putting the financial screws to any of these would-be criminals for breaking those laws?
Seems like much ado about nothing. Just who didn’t expect Congress to not do the right thing and say no to more big business money? Cretainly not me!
I guess I’ll check back again in a week or so. If you’re sticking with this format, I’ll be gone. Sorry. I enjoyed the dialogue here. But this crap is simply unusable on a small screen and downright ugly on a big screen.
The Pols already have “FREE FRANKING” PRIVILGES – free postage in other words – (which is why they won’t let the Post Office go out of business !) – why would they want to SCREW UP THE CELL PHONE SYSTEM – and COST US MORE FOR RECEIVING THEIR SPAM ???
I’m even more glad that I jettisoned my cell phone back in April. Yes, I’ll no doubt have to get another one eventually. But it was 90% expensive annoyance and 10% convenient communication device.
The land line phone, which seems to ring exclusively when I’m in the bathroom, fighting with they key to get into my house, trying to sleep, eat, or listen to a much anticipated tv or radio program is bad enough.
I DO keep a list of political organizations that call me (robo or not). Unless there is some other compelling reason, they don’t get my vote.
I think it will be time to develop a Conditional Forward APP for my phone that will forward this ROBO call to my congressman when they come in depending on what district my GPS says I’m in at the time.
I have unlimited minutes and will pay for the call both ways!