Hey you, the guy with the New Jersey accent who keeps offering me a small business loan: I hate you. I hate you with a passion that eclipses any love or loathing that I have felt for anything in the mortal world. I hate you and your army of randomly-dialing robots, I hate you and your legions of foreign switchboard operators trying to sucker Americans into possibly illegal and/or phony loans. The multiple times that I've actually gone through your rigamarole claiming to be Archibald Buttz, the owner of a talking dildo emporium called "Buzzwords," has not kept you from calling me on my private cell phone several times a week. The world would be immeasurably improved if you were to step in front of a bus.

That's you, New Jersey loan scam guy. You are literally Hitler shooting me with phone bullets.

The Federal Communications Commission seems to agree with me, in spirit if not in the actual details. The FCC will begin releasing a report full of data on "robocalls" and telemarketers, in the hopes that developers will be able to incorporate it into tools that will help block them more effectively. You can download the first spreadsheet from the FCC's Consumer Help Center site, which includes self-reported data given to the Commission by ticked-off Americans like me. The spreadsheet includes the time of the call, the caller ID number, and whether the call was pre-recorded or not. The spreadsheet will be updated weekly.

This is a small help, to be honest - cold-calling and robocalls are already illegal for most business applications, and telemarketers and scammers already use tools to obfuscate their real phone numbers and other personal information. But it's a start, and it's good to see that the FCC is acknowledging that the scope of these calls has far outpaced any kind of legislative solution. App developers, and hopefully the carriers themselves, will start using this data to counter the efforts of telemarketers and scammers. It won't make me hate them any less, but perhaps I won't have to deal with a 3AM offer for a free home security system again.

Source: FCC