If any of you are members of the Marketing Research Association, could you please contact them and ask them to change their position on this issue:
I have a feeling they won’t mind if you call them at home. With an autodialer. “Pollsters now must hand-dial cellphones, at great expense,” indeed. It’s that expensive to pay people to push a few buttons, huh?
Those creepy lobbyists are so creepy. Yeah, yeah, I know they’re part of the political process, but I don’t have to like them or their puppets in Congress.
This issue has been prominent for a couple of years as pollsters panic over their abysmal response rates, but the FCC has already firmly made their final ruling.
RoboCall & CellFone Pollsters lost, big time … but apparently are still really desperate.
Are there any non-creepy professional lobbyists or politicians ?
You may say something like “I’m a tenured prof, I don’t have a financial stake in this,” but at a minimum you have a professional stake. If pollsters can reach more people more cheaply fewer people will use MRP. Feel free to explain how you don’t really care or benefit if people use MRP and the like, but the expensive thing is NOT just punching in the number, but having to pay someone to listen to it ring. Having worked on political campaigns when campaigns first started using predictive dialers — that annoying technology where more people are called than callers — I can say that this technology allows you to call twice as many people. It’s incredibly efficient. So even if you are going to poo poo the idea that you personally benefit from sparser polling data, understand that the inability to use automated technology is doubling the price for the rest of us.
Anon:
No, the more data you have the more you can do with MRP. In the Xbox survey we had hundreds of thousands of respondents! I just think these autocalls are immoral. If you want to waste the time of thousands of people who go over to pick up the phone, damn straight you can pay someone to listen to it ring on your end!
@Anonymous
Can you elaborate about how ” the inability to use automated technology is doubling the price for the rest of us”?
That wasn’t clear to me.
Presumably callers are paid for hours worked, not calls made, so doubling the call rate halves the price of each call.
Ah; So “rest of us” meant the pollsters.
Let’s just make it so autodialers are legal, but all autodialer numbers MUST come from a particular area code. Then we can all just block that area code, and get it over with ;-)
That sounds like a brilliant idea. But the problem with all of this is that there is no enforcement.
I have had my land line on the do-not-call list for years. But the calls keep coming, and complaints yield nothing. The same callers just resume their work under a different name and number. I get spam robocalls on my cell phone all the time, even though it’s illegal for them to place those.
Interestingly, I have never gotten a robocall from a pollster on my cell phone. The pollsters seem to be the only ones following the rules: the marketers just call anyway. These telemarketers are just parasites, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop them. They just ignore the laws and regulations.
I think the best solution would be an app that detects incoming robocalls and automatically blocks the call for you. I have no idea if that’s technically possible or not.
Well the best way to detect a robocall is if it has to come from a given block of caller-ids. If it doesn’t there’s really nothing reliable you can do to detect them, they’re just phone calls after all. It’s not like the other end has a fax machine that’s making a loud piercing noise or something.
I suppose you might be able to use what’s called “early media” (one-way incoming sound) to detect an ultra-quiet condition or something, but I think robo-callers would just rapidly adopt by sending you recorded background noise or music or something. Also I don’t think on a cell phone you have access to that early media from an app. I suppose there could be a cooperative collection of caller-ids in a global black-list, but there are hacks there too.
It would seem to me that the way to deal with this is to create a number you can forward the call to. If the caller can prove they’re a person by responding to requests for button pushes… then they don’t get billed. Otherwise their carrier chargest them $500 and applies it to your phone bill.
So, you get a call, it’s not from robo-ID, you forward the call to 1800-HATE-ROBO, they have to have a person on the line to respond to a some requests for random numbers, “please press 5110951, ok now spell out the word ‘raisin’ ok now enter 5 if you are a person and 7 if you are a robot” or they get billed $500 and you get the money.
One strategy for an app would be to build a database of telemarketer numbers. This wouldn’t even need legislating a single area code.
Success would depend on the penetration level of the app and how many target numbers the telemarketers dial using one source number.
The problem seems to be the ability to spoof or even block the source number. I think that’s a loophole the cellphone providers need to fix.
There are companies that will let you buy up massive blocks of 10,000 numbers for a month or two. A database approach would rapidly break the telephone system as an arms-race ensued.
Yeah, the do-not-call list seems to be honored in the breach all too often.
1. Despite being on the Do Not Call list, our landline phone gets several junk calls a day.
2. My cell phone gets maybe one junk call a month.
3. I prefer state #2 to state #1. (Press 5 on your touchtone phone for “Strongly Prefer”)
4. I don’t care if that makes it difficult / expensive to pollsters (Press 7 for “Really, Really Do Not Care”). Note the main problem with pollsters is the massive decline in response rates (as shown in successive Pew surveys). These aren’t due to cell phone issues, but to the fact that people don’t like answering surveys much any more. Making it easier to do surveys isn’t going to help with this problem.
All of this polling, surveys and prediction seems such non-productive activity. Especially at the scale it is carried out at now.
Actual elections are finally what matter. What’s the point behind this gigantic industry that predicts, then re-predicts the outcome on a daily basis trying to read signs in what’s mostly just ephemeral changes and noise.
Fine, it makes sense to whoever is making money off this (e.g. the newspapers, pundits and TV Channels) but what’s the big gain to society by having University academics spend so much time, money and effort on election prediction?
Suppose we (for any value of “we”) accept your claim that there’s negligible socially redeeming value to the massive polling, surveying, and prediction that currently happens. Okay, now what?
Let’s do less of it.
What are you, some kind of Communist?
..because I’m down with that shit.
Fienberg seems to be arguing that the current system is like a semi-automatic gun: a human must press a button for every phone dialed, but after doing so the next one in the chamber is “loaded” without any human effort. That’s an entirely separate issue from the one Anonymous discusses above, whether or not someone is paid to listen to the phone ring.