HN Explorer

Ask HN: Junk Mail

2 points by 18pfsmt ↗ HN
I get several pieces of junk mail per day. When asked to remove me from a list, they often ask my name or social security number. They should only need my address because that is what they use to send it, but they want all sorts of personally identifying info, which I am simply unwilling to provide. I have started recording these discussions and plan to post them publicly, but I am unsure of the ethical nature of doing so. Your thoughts?

4 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 21.7 ms ] thread
mooism2
In some jurisdictions it is illegal (civil offence) to record a phone conversation without informing the other party (which is why whenever I phone my bank I am told my call "may be recorded for training purposes" long before I am put through to a human).
18pfsmt
My understanding is that in Colorado, it is perfectly ok to record with one-party knowledge.
jtheory
You should be able to remove yourself from their lists with just the information on the mail they sent you -- name & address and possibly an ID included on some catalogs.

There are also a couple of registries where you can add yourself to auto-clean yourself from lots of junk mailer lists. (I don't remember the exact details now).

I left the US in 2006, but set a forwarding address to a US remailer address -- I was able to successfully stop virtually all junk mail doing just what I listed above.

Your route sounds like you have a lot of free time on your hands -- if you actually do, and want to work on stopping the poor practices, that's great. But there are probably LOTS of them out there doing it wrong, and if you actually have better windmills to tilt at, I'd say just use the registries and go work on something else more important to you.

You can't fix everything that's wrong in this world; it's good to realize that and decide, really think about and decide, where you want to put your energies.

18pfsmt
Well, if you must know, I am the "IT Guy" for 9 different construction outfits. I'm not even a real programmer, but I am trying to learn (currently erlang, lua, python, ruby, and javascript; also git, and vim). I am now recording all my calls with these companies. I intend to post them to reddit, once cleaned up.