The Cellphone Sellout

There’s wonderful news on the cellphone front for telemarketers, spammers, used-car salesmen and real estate agents. Within months, an association of cellular and Internet communicators will be selling a nationwide directory of private cellphone numbers. Super news for those feeling slighted and unrecognized in an impersonal world because they weren’t receiving their fair share of unsolicited telephone calls. Now you can have such wireless encounters in meetings, movies, cars, restaurants, bed.

Also, people need waste no more time deciding who gets cell access to them and their monthly minutes. Everyone on the planet with 99 cents will be able to find you anytime, anywhere. And you can pay for it. Wait one darned message unit!

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.

This is an unintended consequence of allowing cell customers to transfer old numbers to new service providers. When 30 million customers changed numbers annually, there was no point to compiling a list. Directory boosters, some no doubt with unlisted home phones, claim that users will be able to opt in or out of a cell directory. Sounds super. True, anyone can still use the federal Do Not Call Registry -- www.donotcall.gov -- which applies to “most telemarketers.” Key word here: most. Have you stopped getting unwanted e-mails or phone calls? Would you like dozens of unsolicited, untraceable text messages or pictures a day on your cell? Why pay next year for something you don’t have today and still don’t want?

This is a privacy matter. The IRS could make millions selling information on family incomes. It can’t legally. You want to release your income, fine. You needn’t opt into privacy; it’s there automatically, and free. Rep. Joseph R. Pitts (R-Pa.) seeks hearings on a law to bar listing or nonlisting fees and force directories to get permission for each number. If that’s too expensive, good.

But publishing private info is also a control issue. We’re unable in modern America to opt out of or into so many things -- traffic jams, smog, pay raises, rent increases, rude passersby, tasteless ads for beer and enhancements. We have few quiet refuges left. Two of them are a private cell where we control the number and a shower where we control the water. Now, half of that’s threatened.