Cellphone listings

So they're planning to sell our cellphone numbers (free registration required for story) to marketers (or whoever has 99 cents). To quote the LaTimes editorial:

This is thoroughly dumb for consumers. Great for sellers of mass access, who could gain an estimated $3 billion in fees and sold minutes by 2009. Also great for telemarketers, who fear that millions more customers will go totally wireless by canceling listed home phones. But double-list this cell directory idea under S for stupid and U for unnecessary. Praise be to Verizon Wireless, which vows not to dump its 39 million numbers into the database. That leaves 121 million of us.

An insistence that numbers not be sold down the road to marketers should be a new thing for us to demand in contracts. But as a matter of convenience, who has time to wade through all that legalese to determine if we even have the protection. You can opt-out, but I opted out and the calls seem to keep coming. Paying for them over my cell phone is a grisly prospect, so I'm glad that my company is refraining from selling the list for now. It's always annoying to me to get one of these calls from telemarketer's computers, and I don't care how many pictures of weeping workers Salon runs on people with crappy jobs.