Stop me before I rant again

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David Shor writes:

I just read an idea for a pollster that crowd-sources statistical work, and was curious what you thought about the idea.

Here’s the idea:

Today, there is a new polling method available: IVR, or ‘Interactive Voice Response’ polling. Basically, the pollster records several questions, a computer auto-dials hundreds of landlines, and with the people who are willing to participate in the survey, they go through the script automatically.

Even though the old media pollsters and traditional polling organisations like AAPOR are busy discrediting those polls that they condescendingly call ‘robopolls’, there is not much evidence that they do any worse than live-interviewer polls- but they are much, much cheaper. . . .

Now, the next step to make polls even easier to access for everyone is there- with the mid-January start-up of the IVR pollster Precision Polling.

From Precision Polling’s website:

Automated Phone Surveys are phone calls where a recorded voice asks you questions and you type in responses on your keypad (e.g. “Who will get your vote for mayor? Press 1 for Joe…”). This provides a fast and affordable way to get answers from real people.

What do I think? I think it’s evil. These robopolls “fast and affordable” for the pollster but not for the person being hassled by the phone call. I think these machine phone calls should be illegal–yes, I would eagerly support a law making it illegal to call someone if there’s no human making the call (fax and data transmission excepted, of course). This would have the side benefit of making all those pre-election endorsement auto-calls illegal, as well as various obnoxious calls used by collection agencies.

It’s simply an abuse of the phone system, just as it would be an abuse of the electrical system to sneak into your neighbor’s house one night, plug in a really long extension cord, and run it out their window to your house to power your appliances.

“Fast and affordable,” indeed! Fast, affordable, and abusive is more like it.

P.S. I feel bad even giving these dudes publicity, but I figure, once it’s on Daily Kos it’s already been read by a million people, so I hope the good I’m doing by disparaging this idea outweighs the harm I’m doing by publicizing it.

P.P.S. I’m not saying the Daily Kos diarist (“twohundertseventy”) is evil, or even that that the people at Precision Polling are bad guys. I just don’t know if they’ve thought through the ethical implications of their suggestion, which amounts to bombarding millions of people with irritating calls at dinnertime. Or perhaps they have a retort to my ethical argument, something like: Lots of people enjoy answering polls, or Polls are essential to democracy. OK, if they’re so damn essential, try paying people to participate in your poll. You’re making money off of them, why not give something back to the people you’re hassling? Grrrr.

P.P.P.S. I agree with commenter Tom that robocalls should be legal if the person being called agrees to it ahead of time.

7 thoughts on “Stop me before I rant again”

  1. The Illinois primary is tomorrow and I got many robocalls over the weekend. I think a $2 tax per call would be a good compromise.

  2. This is the same externality problem as e-mail spam. There's a very small cost for the sender (say one millionth of a cent per message). There's an order of magnitude higher benefit for the sender for the suckers that answer (say one thousandth of a cent per message) There's an order of magnitude increase in expense for e-mail providers who have to store the spam (say one hundredth of a cent per message). Finally, there's a small cost ( say one cent per message) borne by end users who have to waste time clearing the e-mail out of the inbox. Those cents add up to billions in misallocated societal resources.

    The solution is aggressive enforcement of anti-spam laws, including penalties relative to the massive cost imposed on society for both spammers and their allies.

  3. Not that this isn't annoying, but won't robocalls will be phased out (eventually) anyway due to no one having landlines? I've never gotten one, as I don't have a landline; the only number in my contacts that is a landline is my parents' home, which just goes straight to a machine since they have their cell phones. The robocall will go the way of the VCR, unless they just want to call businesses all day long. Or, unless cell phones are opened up to them, which I doubt, considering how the cellphone payment is structured.

    Now that I think about it, the whole motivation behind this "fast and affordable" practice is probably partly due to them getting a lot fewer hits with landline calls.

  4. Zbicyclist, Cody: Yes, I agree that making phone or email spammers pay would be a good idea.

    Elissa: I didn't know they can't robocall cell phones. How does that work?

  5. Hmm…"I would eagerly support a law making it illegal to call someone if there's no human making the call"?

    I got a 6AM robocall this morning, and I don't want that to be illegal: it was an announcement of a two-hour school delay. This is an opt-in service. I'm also happy to get robocalls of appointment confirmations from various doctors' offices; I think this should be opt-out, but I wouldn't mind having only opt-in calls. Still, I think your point should be narrowed a bit. Do we really disagree?

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