In the merry, merry month of May Houston residents fielded 148 million robocalls.
The city has a little over 2 million residents. We’ve been cautioned so many times not to answer calls from numbers we don’t recognize that most of us haven’t spoken to each other in a while, but perhaps SOME relief is coming.
The Federal Communications Commission has announced they are going to let phone carriers start restricting robocalls by the end of the year, but according to data privacy expert Dr. Edward Peters there are more questions than there are answers.
“Are they going to provide this for free or are people going to be expected to pay for it?” he inquires.
Dunno. Houston gets 2.3 million robocalls every single day. Again, there’s less than two-and-a-half million of us. Does that mean that AT&T will block the same calls that Verizon will?
“Does that mean that they get to decide what robocall needs to be stopped and what isn’t?” asks Dr. Peters.
Does who gets through to you determine on who your service provider is?
“That sounds pretty much like censorship to me,” says Peters.
What are they going to do and what is it going to cost? We don’t know yet. How effective is it going to be? We don’t know yet. When will it start? We don’t know yet.
But our elation at the news that someone in government is doing something to address our collective frustrations speaks to how really frustrated we all are.
Dr. Peters says whatever works its way through the system will be detailed by your carrier in a mailing to you at some point in the not too distant future, and he suggests you read your phone company mail for a while to monitor for developments.