CASL Sucks – My Solution to Spam & Mass Marketing Calls

Think about how many times you’ve received calls about the following:

• Issues with your Microsoft security
• Duct cleaning
• Credit card opportunities from your very own card service, CRDNNN uh NRC uh CRC

The CRTC and CASL have been useless when it comes to stopping them.  Asking people in countries outside Canada to never call you again falls on deaf ears. Making complaints to our regulatory bodies is a complete waste of time.

CASL as it turns out was a complete waste for everyone in Canada as it only applied to Canadians and Canadian companies.  It is largely unenforceable on a global scale so is a complete fail on the part of policy makers when it comes to understanding the intricacies of communication on a global scale.

In Canada, the main perpetrator of spam and mass marketing calls are our phone companies and Internet service providers that sell our phone numbers to bulk calling companies, but it may also be something as simple as moderately complex technological and database-driven ‘scraping’ tools that allow fraudsters to collect our personal information.

The latter issue is unenforceable, but any Canadian company should be banned from selling personal or account-related data to third parties without our express permission.  In other words, these practices must be made illegal.

Also, all of these calls come from somewhere, most likely somewhere in Asian-Pacific countries like India, Malaysia and so on.

I would like to say that I’m more enlightened and global in my social circle, but I NEVER make calls to these countries and I do NOT receive ‘normal’ calls from these countries.

With that in mind, there is a rather elegant and simple solution to this massive problem and annoyance:  I should be able to contact my technology or phone company and tell them that I do not want to receive messages from any country other than from a list that I indicate is ‘safe’.

This is a simple, tidy solution that our governments need to force on our media companies and tech providers.  We block content from the US and elsewhere on a regular basis to ‘protect’ our Canadian content (a bullshit issue I can get into another time, but won’t here) or ‘parental blockers’ to protect our kids from porn (even though we don’t seem to need to block them from being brainwashed by security industry funded movies like ‘Ironman’).

Why can’t we block ‘content’ when it’s unwanted?

If we don’t, fraud will escalate in this country on an exponential scale as unsuspecting citizens fall prey to a growing plague of scams.