Tell a friend
With
the general election still a few months off,
the subject of robocalling
is probably far from the minds of most voters.
But Shaun Dakin has
become a quixotic national crusader against
these automated calls, and
he wants to put politicos on notice.
Dakin, the founder of the non-profit National Political Do Not Contact Registry, is launching a new initiative to push California regulators to enforce its little-noted robocall rule.
"What we're trying to do is to make politicians understand that there is a law on the books against these kinds of automated robocalls without a live person -- it's $500 per incident per violation," he says. "We want to make them realize that someone's paying attention to this."
With few exceptions, California's public utilities code says that robocalls are only legal when they're introduced by a live person. But Dakin says that the rules are never enforced, and points to the spate of robocalls conducted by the presidential candidates during this year's primaries as an example.
He says that thousands of Californians have
already entered
themselves on his unofficial registry in the
hopes that they won't
receive any more automated political calls. The
Federal Trade
Commission's do-not-call list doesn't cover
political calls.
Asked
why he just focuses on political calls, when so
many private companies
are also ignoring California's law, Dakin says
his prime goal is to
improve the quality of political discussion. He
was spurred to take up
this project after participating in a couple of
volunteer campaign
phone-banking efforts in 2004 and 2006. He
found that Americans were
angry to be called by live humans, which made
him wonder what they
think of automated calls.
"Robocalls provide no opportunity for discourse -- they're just phone spam, people hoping that you'll listen to their message," he says.
Dakin has a form on his organization's web site that has just been set up to collect data about robocall campaigns reaching Californians. His goal is to collect as much data as possible from as many people as possible, and then to file a complaint on their behalf with the California Public Utilities Commission.