Are Canadian telemarketers quaking in their boots? Maybe.

My pos­i­tion: tele­market­ing is annoy­ing and should be elim­in­ated. DO NOT WANT!
My reas­on­ing: I did not ask for the call; hence it is an intru­sion. It uses up my resources (time) without my request or approv­al. I did not ask for you to call me offer­ing a home secur­ity audit for an alarm com­pany. My cur­rent ser­vice is fine thank you. Don’t call me. I’ll call you.

As a res­ult, my phone is locked on Do Not Dis­turb. I don’t hear the phone calls — all incom­ing calls go dir­ectly to voice mail. Nice and quiet now.

But why should I have to have a phone that screens my calls? I pay my phone com­pany a fee just to add tele­marketers to my ‘blocked’ list. I’m pay­ing for the priv­ilege of hav­ing a peace­ful din­ner at home.

Soon all this may change, as Canada will imple­ment a Do Not Call list.

The Cana­dian gov­ern­ment passed legis­la­tion in 2005 man­dat­ing the cre­ation of a do-not-call registry. The registry is sched­uled to take effect in mid-2008, yet many Cana­dians may be dis­ap­poin­ted to learn about the exemp­tion of a wide range of organ­iz­a­tions (registered char­it­ies, busi­ness with pri­or rela­tion­ships, polit­ic­al parties, sur­vey com­pan­ies, and news­pa­pers). Under the law, exemp­ted organ­iz­a­tions are per­mit­ted to make unso­li­cited tele­phone calls des­pite the inclu­sion of the num­ber in the do-not-call registry.

So, there’s a loop­hole, and a rather large one at that. But wait…there’s more!

Cana­dians now have their own Do Not Call ser­vice (iOptOut.ca), hos­ted by renowned online-media-rights law pro­fess­or Michale Geist. iOp­tOut (still in beta) is a free ser­vice where Cana­dians can register up to three phone num­bers and email addresses as part of set­ting up their iOp­tOut profile.

Once the pro­file is set up, iOp­tOut mem­bers select organ­iz­a­tions to be noti­fied of their pref­er­ence to opt-out of mar­ket­ing com­m­un­ci­ations. Just select an industry, say News­pa­per, check all, and an email will be sent to all registered news­pa­pers indic­at­ing that you no longer want them call­ing or email­ing you for sub­scrip­tions. By law they must comply.

As I under­stand it, Canada’s do not call legis­la­tion (and the offi­cial cana­dian DNC registry) allows some organ­iz­a­tions to be ‘exempt’ from the legis­la­tion. iOp­tOut fills that exemp­tion hole.

How does iOp­tOut work?
iOp­tOut con­tains a data­base of organ­iz­a­tions, all of which are exemp­ted under the cur­rent law. When you register with iOp­tOut you cre­ate a per­son­al list of organ­iz­a­tions that you wish to opt-out from fur­ther mar­ket­ing. You provide your name, tele­phone number(s) and email address(es) and we send a mes­sage to each organ­iz­a­tion, on your behalf, ask­ing that they remove you from their act­ive mar­ket­ing or polling lists. You could send a mes­sage to each organ­iz­a­tion your­self indi­vidu­ally, but there are hun­dreds and the appro­pri­ate con­tact inform­a­tion is often dif­fi­cult to obtain. iOp­tOut allows you to do this in bulk, opt­ing out of dozens of organ­iz­a­tions with a few clicks.

Do I still need to register my phone num­ber with the “official” do-not-call registry once it is operational?
Yes. IOp­tOut com­ple­ments the forth­com­ing do-not-call registry by filling in the gaps cre­ated by exemp­ted organ­iz­a­tions. You will still need to register your phone num­ber with the do-not-call registry once it becomes operational.

So, I’ve opted out. We’ll see if this reduces the num­ber of calls com­ing in from ‘Man­itoba’ or ‘Ontario’. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s no way to opt out of incom­ing tele­market­ing calls from out­side of Canada. Savvy tele­marketers will soon switch to ser­vices hos­ted in the Amer­ica, or off­shore. Sigh.

Quotes cour­tesy iOptOut.ca FAQ and Michael Geist’s blog.