The “Robocall” Summit

On October 18th the FTC will hold a summit on the use of automated dialing technology (aka robocalling) when interacting consumers.

Many industries from politics to sales to debt collection use robodialing as an inexpensive way to reach consumers. From my perspective robocalling is nothing more than phone spam. Through the CAN-SPAM legislation the FTC has been able to enforce parameters on commercial emails and the time has come to do the same thing for robocalling.

Some may argue against this saying the Do Not Call Registry allows a mechanism for consumers to opt-out of these calls, while true, the Do Not Call Registry generally does not apply to debt collectors.

I believe the Do Not Call Registry should not apply to collectors because companies that are owed money should have the ability to have a dialog to resolve the matter. However, there surely needs to be some common sense limits it place. Limiting call attempts to 1 or 2 per day and requiring that it be a real person seem like logical places to start.