The upcoming Canadian Do Not Call List is coming into effect on September 30. Once the site is active you will be able to register your phone number so telemarketers won’t be permitted to phone you. (Note that this is just marketing calls. Organizations with legitimate, non-marketing reasons for calling you can still do so.) Unfortunately the DNCL is full of holes, with hundreds of organizations exempted from the list, including charities, pollsters, political parties, and companies with which you have an existing relationship (banks, telecoms, etc.). Which hardly makes a DNC list worth it at all.

In order to be exempt, however, these organizations agreed to establish internal do-not-call lists. When a person contacts these companies to ask not to get any more calls, they must comply. To make things easier for people, privacy law maven Michael Geist has set up iOptOut.ca. Here you can register your phone numbers and email addresses, and the site will email requests to hundreds of exempted organizations to take you off their marketing lists—much more efficient than contacting all these organizations yourself.

The Canadian Marketing Association and the Canadian Bankers Association pouted and stamped their little feet about this site, trying to argue to the CRTC that they need not honour requests made on behalf of people by a third-party organization. However, the CRTC actually made a good decision for once and decreed that third-party requests are just fine, dandy and valid and if a company doesn’t comply they’ll get whacked with fines.

We’ll see how this all pans out come September 30 (I’m not holding my breath), but could we actually be seeing a decrease in annoying telemarketer calls soon?