Abuse of the Canadian Do Not Call List
The Globe and Mail [link to http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090123.wdonotcall23/BNStory/National/home no longer works] and the CBC each report that Canada’s Do Not Call list is being used by telemarketers both good and bad (where each term is relative).
This is a bit sad for Canada. The US’s DNC list has been very successful, and one of the very few places where the US has leadership in privacy. Before the DNC list, I used to get a dozen or so calls a day. The annoying ones would be the junk faxes coming to our main line between 3am and 6am. The nightly ritual had to include taking the phone off the hook for some time. These days, the only issue we have are the people we affectionately call “The Illegal Carpet Cleaners.”
On the other hand this is an opportunity. There’s a fine of up to $15,000 for violating the DNC list in Canada, and this could easily be a profit center for the privacy commission. If I were a legitimate firm in Canada, I’d be looking closely at my marketing plans now. No one’s going to feel sorry for the company that is found to have been calling people from a stolen DNC list.
Both articles point out that complete fraudsters are an issue, and companies such as “a Caribbean telemarketer selling fake Caribbean cruises” now have more numbers they can use. But those numbers are stolen property of a sort, and toxic. They can be a tool against foreign scammers. After all, the tourist board of said Caribbean island wouldn’t want to seem uncooperative to people trying to stop fraud and dinner interruptions. If I were a scammer, I’d also want to examine the phone numbers I have recently gotten, because those could be dangerous to have as well.
It remains to be seen how Canada will handle it, how they’ll track down the loss, how they’ll recover from it. It will be interesting to watch, because they’re good and they take privacy seriously. There’s the potential for some seriously tasty lemonade to be made from these lemons. I have my fingers crossed.
Interestingly enough, this is exactly why the idea of a “Do Not Spam” list was abandoned — it was feared that it would simply be used by spammers as a list of valid email addresses.
And here I thought the problem of allowing people to verify if a string is a part of a list, without giving them the list in clear text, was a problem we had solved already in cryptography…
(Yes, I am aware of brute force and dictionary attacks, but they don’t really seem like a large issue here…)