FCC Considering Banning Transfer of Online Consent Forms

&gt; We propose to ban the practice of obtaining a single consumer consent as grounds for delivering calls and text messages from multiple marketers...<p>I honestly don&#x27;t understand how this isn&#x27;t already a thing. The bit about Lending Tree struck a chord with me. I tried it once. I expected offers on the screen. Instead, I immediately received text messages, emails, and phone calls from multiple lenders at the same time. I was furious at every one of them.<p>&gt; Caught in the middle are the innocent companies trying to sell their legitimate products to interested consumers. They want no part of fraudulent leads or fraudulent lawsuits. They’re just trying to help someone buy a home or get car insurance.<p>No, not innocent. &quot;Hey, I&#x27;ve got a get rich quick scheme! I&#x27;ll give you leads for customers, but you have to call them fast before my other customers do!&quot; Nothing innocent about that. You sign up for that, you know exactly what you are doing, and you know damn well it&#x27;s wrong.

I think this is one of those cases where if the &quot;lead generation&quot; industry died in a fire I would be okay with that.<p>At Google there was a poster that read, &quot;For every search there is the perfect Ad&quot; and someone had written on it, &quot;most times that is no ad at all.&quot; which lasted for maybe a week and a half before it was taken down.<p>So often there is no &quot;value&quot; to the person doing the action, the &quot;value&quot; is between the web site and the people who want to get information about you.

I’m having a really hard time, feeling sorry for these folks.<p>I get <i>a ton</i> of spam texts, every day. Not quite as bad as the spoofed robocalls, and a mere shadow of the email spam I get (which suddenly exploded, so I guess they figured out how to get past the low-level gatekeepers).<p>The legit folks sell you to the non-legit folks, then say “I’m not responsible for what <i>they</i> do with it!”

I’m trying to find the downside here.<p>The author clearly thinks that business can only exist if you annoy the prospect until they buy to make you go away. There are other, more customer friendly business models.

Donate to one political campaign and suddenly you&#x27;ll be getting text solicitations from all over the country every election cycle. F that, I want this regulation.

I am unclear what the complaint is here - it seems to be implying that the author thinks that me providing my contact details to one company _should_ be a valid reason that an unrelated company should be able to contact me, and that somehow a &quot;lead generator&quot; is anything other than that?<p>I get that there are people who&#x27;s business model is buying contact information and claiming the sellers of that information gained a blanket consent to spam that contact, but I don&#x27;t know a single person - who doesn&#x27;t make money from spamming people - who has ever wanted that.<p>I also appreciate the euphemism of &quot;lead generation&quot; rather than spammer.

Good. The text message harassment I have been getting is awful and I wish nothing short of a swift death to the “lead generation industry”. They’re the reason why my default ringtone for non-contacts is silent.

&gt; Caught in the middle are the innocent companies trying to sell their legitimate products to interested consumers. They want no part of fraudulent leads<p>Ah, yes. The innocent companies!<p>Like those that lapped up ill-gotten leads from Facebook until consumers could actually choose not to have their habits collated and sold off.<p>Companies will look the other way so long as the leads are cheap enough and result in sales.

While I appreciate the enthusiasm of the &quot;Czar&quot; the fact of the matter is the industry has had decades to &quot;self police&quot;. Let the whole industry burn to the ground- it earned it.

There is an ethical way to market products which relies on transparency to the audience and not tricking or repurposing leads for secondary purposes. Blocking more of these shady tactics makes it easier to do the right thing and requires you to build marketing programs for and around people who actually want your offering.

And while we’re at it, can we ban companies from sending me marketing email just because I used my credit card to buy something from you in your store.<p>I feel like it’s square that’s driving this. I’ll buy a coffee or something small and immediately be signed up for that businesses email list. No consent, no option not to be emailed. Just automatically marketed to bc I swiped my card at their checkout.

I love how it&#x27;s framed as destructive to the &quot;lead generation industry&quot;.<p>it is nuts how salespeople view themselves. they&#x27;re the heroes who drive business, they&#x27;re the backbone of the economy, etc.<p>anyone negatively impacted by the banning of online consent forms is doing shady shit in the first place.

Former employee at Assurance IQ, the company from the article.<p>One of our data scientists determined that the sketchy lead sales were a net negative to a customer’s lifetime value. Assurance IQ kept doing it because it makes (less) money faster.<p>It built a whole marketplace around this junk: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gonectar.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gonectar.com</a><p>The former CEO did it to make quick money. Current leadership sticks with it out of ineptitude.<p>Something like 12 out of the last 13 quarters were unprofitable.

Wow I get they earn their money that way.. but it’s relying on clearly unethical tactics that are obviously undesired by society but not necessarily illegal yet. this really shows how regulations are required because otherwise people will do stuff like that.

As someone who manages code that sends out legitimate text messages for operational purposes, this is a good thing. By lowering the potential of spam situations, this will hopefully make legitimate text message sending easier to manage.

I apparently got signed up for some company on my work email and now I get a series of emails from some B2B company. I unsubscribe. Next day, another company. Unsubscribe. Next day, another company.<p>Its trivial, but it&#x27;s so fucking annoying that I&#x27;ve visualized doing violent things as I hit unsubscribe.

&gt;<i>Going to be a bunch of long faces at LeadsCon this year.</i><p>I have no idea why but I laughed out loud at this sentence.<p>LeadsCon? Really?

A bit of a ramble, but: There is something fundamentally broken about connection (messaging, email, phone, whatever) information being cloneable. Either a) the identifier of the channel by which you contact me requires something from your identity to use, so it can&#x27;t be used by other people, or b) there is no core address, they are all tear-off contacts (analagous to a TCP session, I guess?) I suppose you would message the main core address, but it just sends a redirect to a new channel. New channels have low reputation by default, and if you delete it (because the other end shared it, or whatever,) they have to get a new tear-off and start over.

Good. Do this for political spam next.

This gives me hope for the future. I’m ok with shutting down the “honest leads” along with all the others as those are few and far between.<p>I had a neighbor who owned a common .com for housing construction that was top seo and all it did was collect your info and sell the lead. I had actually used it before I met my neighbor and hated it. He ran it in the least scammy way possible, but it still boiled down to having a bunch of contractors call and email me and the experience was bad.<p>I think phone calls should be run like apple does push notifications. Someone who doesn’t care (apple) confirms you want them and provides a simple way to turn them off when you no longer want them.<p>I’ve had very few spam push messages and never two from the same org as I just block them.<p>Texts and calls should be similar. Agreeing to be contacted by one vendor and then getting stuff forever from anyone that vendor sells to is ridiculous.

Lmao spam callers on suicide watch.<p>It’s absolutely hilarious seeing the begging and the coping from this guy as he desperately tries to persuade us that consumers need fraudlent call centres to live their lives. Nah, I think I’m alright thanks.

This is great! I’m looking forward to similar regulation for email spam.

Terms and conditions forms online are such a joke.<p>We thought the ancients were cruel and heartless but here we are signing forms we cannot comprehend and using them as a basis for denying people legal protections.

The demise of unsolicited calls and texts cannot come soon enough. Ideally they would be tarred, feathered, and quartered, but I’ll settle for just putting them out of business.

How many times have you seen a company with a privacy policy saying something like, &quot;we value your privacy, we&#x27;ll never sell your data&quot; and also having a clause about sharing your data with companies they already do business with? Oh, they&#x27;re not <i>selling</i> your data, they&#x27;re <i>sharing</i> it. It&#x27;s such an obvious loophole buried under gobblygook language.

I find this part the most interesting. How do I easily sue companies for TCPA violations?<p>&gt; There’s another problem too– professional plaintiffs (and their lawyers) exploit the abuses in the industry and fill out forms by the barrelful to set up TCPA lawsuits. These days it is REALLY hard to tell the difference between lead fraud and litigator fraud until you are deep into a case.<p>Burn it all to the ground.

Two months ago, evidently someone put my number on some online form somewhere. I now get multiple messages&#x2F;calls a day, addressed to &quot;Lora&quot;, offering to help her with everything from insurance, to counseling&#x2F;therapy, to public assistance, to rental properties. In the last 2 weeks, the calls are all Spanish-speaking.<p>My # is on the do not call list. Guess how much that helps...<p>Different situation: 2 years ago, I needed to move across the country. My dad decided to help and so he put my phone # into a website to give you a quote for moving. I was instantly inundated by calls from multiple moving companies, all of which sounded &quot;off&quot;, all from that one form. (BTW, several of these companies were out of Florida. Just do a quick online search for florida moving company scams.) As a final note, it was cheaper to rent a truck from Penske and hire a friend to drive it the 1,000 miles. And, in case you care, Penske was $1,000 less than U-Haul and had better guarantees... I strongly recommend them!

I&#x27;m having trouble coming up with any reason my response to this should be anything other than &quot;Hallelujah!&quot;

As a consumer, this seems great for me.

How does this guy sleep at night?

Great.<p>What I really want is mandatory opt-in to be able to contact me.<p>Unknown numbers get to send a single standard length SMS, carrier embeds the full legal name and, for businesses, legally registered mailing address, and I can choose whether to accept. If I don&#x27;t, no other contact from that number is connected to my phone. Ever.<p>I can also report the message as unsolicited and every company&#x27;s unsolicited contact stats are made available to regulators.

Less harassment, I’m all for it

I have been objecting to third party consent dialogues for some time. It seems like a cheap cop out. Who manages my consent of the third party consent dialogue provider to store my consent? Yet another third party? See the problem? An honest website will keep the data itself and not share consent info with an unrelated third party. Users deserve at least that much.

Lead generation means selling my name to other businesses. I want my cut.<p>If I get a call, email, or text from a business that bought my name, they need to include payment in the message of the same amount they paid the lead generator, whether I end up using their service or not. If not, their message goes straight to the spam folder and I never see it.<p>You gotta pay to bypass my filter.

&quot;TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST AND NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.&quot; - burn this into your brain and state it as quickly as you can next time you get one of those &quot;Mr. AA-JV, I&#x27;m calling to tell you about a worrying situation with your PC ..&quot; calls.<p>Works every time. They know what it means.

Does this impact B2B lead gen, or just consumers?

Please, fix the text color - it’s so light it’s unreadable on a phone screen without major fidgeting.

Thank god