No More Calls

It is getting harder and harder to get away from marketers. Your mailbox gets stuffed on the daily basis with what appears to be literally tonnes of unsolicited offers. My unlisted cell phone is constantly ringing from the numbers I do not recognize. Consumers are revolting. The governments are taking actions. But the madness just keeps on going.

One man in Canada decided to take matters in his own hands. He developed what we consider an Existing Alternative to government run Do-Not-Call list. Rather than waiting for the government to deliver on its promise of fully functioning comprehensive list, he started his own. That’s right, Michael Geist, a law professor from University of Ottawa has started his own private do not call list, iOptout.ca.

When you become a member, you need to provide the service with your contact information and company names you don’t want to hear fromo. The service is not endorsed by any commercial or government organization, some of them are actually actively suing him. So, in order to suppress the members’ information from different call lists, he simply emails all the big callers requests on behalf of each individual member. When he does that, he actually targets specific company officers with individual requests. So far the list boasts about 17,000 members, so that would mean a lot of email.



While we can’t endorse such a radical guerrilla tactic, in the absence of anything more proper, it seems to be the only effective Existing Alternative.