Why Should Direct Marketers Comply?

We have faith in voluntary compliance

For most direct marketers, it's clearly the better choice

We expect most companies will want to comply with DECLARATIONs for several reasons.

It's a waste of their money to contact people who don't want to hear from them. Declarations give them a cheap and easy way of finding out who these people are in advance.
Most large direct marketing companies already have Web sites. They will soon find that consumers can send bulk email instructions not to contact them. This will cost them time and money to process, and receiving the email may place legal obligations on them.
Most companies would rather take a hint than risk being hit with something stronger.
U.S. Federal law requires every company making telemarketing calls to keep a list of consumers who ask not to be called, and stops them from calling those numbers for ten years. Consumers they later call can sue for damages of $500-$1500.
A different law lets consumers tell the Post Office that they never want to get another piece of mail from any given sender. If they send anything else, they risk being prosecuted as criminals. Because direct marketers see that you are Junkbusters client, they know that you know how to do these things. They know you're one of the people they don't want to annoy.
People who live in other countries are welcome to tell us about their local laws, so that we can tell our clients around the world about their rights.
Finally, if enough consumers publish DECLARATIONs on the Web and find that their instructions are being ignored, some Web entrepreneurs will surely offer them enforcement services. Everyone is used to the idea of using physical security companies when government law enforcement officers (police) aren't enough. Similarly, people will soon find the need for data security companies to protect their privacy when government enforcement isn't enough.
We can't predict what these services will look like, and we have no intention of promoting them or providing them ourselves, but we have thought through some of the obvious possibilities. We quickly came to the conclusion that even if direct marketers wanted to, they probably couldn't resist the pressures that could be applied by the Internet to force them to comply.

Declarations of permission and prohibition help everybody

We believe that direct marketing companies would actually prefer to follow your DECLARATION rather than buy data about you to guess how likely you are to buy their stuff (which is what they have to do now). It will be easier and less expensive than contacting the people only to be ignored or warned off.

No more excuses

Once large number of people have published DECLARATIONs on the Web, direct marketers won't be able to use the excuse ``But we had no way of knowing that you didn't want to hear from us.'' Even tiny companies will be able to use Altavista or other search engines to check beforehand, for example by entering a query consisting of your telephone number and the keyword junkbusters. The time needed to tell everyone that you don't want to be called is now just one day.

The customer is always right, especially in groups of millions

We encourage direct marketers to comply with DECLARATIONs, but we don't think it will be necessary or even helpful to threaten most of companies. We believe that their most effective motivation is the knowledge that consumers are saying what they want to each and every company, in the largest public forum in the world. You can be a part of this force by standing up and being counted, and by taking the trouble to tell companies what you want.

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