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The NYTimes carried this story on Monday (Aug 30): For Now, Unwired Means Unlisted. That May Change. Here's the sentence that is most significant in the story:
In October, most major cellphone carriers plan to start compiling a publicly accessible listing of wireless phone numbers.As the article points out, this is causing not a little bit of hand-wringing both with cell-phone users and with carriers.
All but Verizon have apparently agreed to cooperate with the directory listing, which casts doubt on the whole thing. Still, if it were to be happening, consumers are at sixes and nines on the matter. On the one hand, our old friends and acquaintances are getting harder to find: only 65-percent of American households are listed in the white pages; a lot of (younger) people are forgoing land lines in favour of a single mobile phone. On the other hand, we're not sure that we want the telemarketers to get to our mobile phone numbers which, like our e-mail accounts, are not just addresses they are personal addresses. [More about this philosophy at a later time.]
It's probably worth thinking about before going ahead: once the genie's out of the bottle . . .
Posted by Grayson at September 1, 2004 07:54 PM