Verizon Bases $5 Fee To Not Publish Your Phone Number On 'Systems and IT' Costs 331
coondoggie writes "Let's say that for whatever reason, you'd rather your telephone number not be published. If you are a Verizon customer, that privacy privilege will cost you $5 a month. And how does Verizon justify such a significant fee for such an insignificant service? 'The cost charged to offer unlisted phone numbers is chiefly systems and IT based,' a media relations spokesman for the company tells Network World. (Asking the same question of online customer service elicited a predictably unenlightening response.) Sixty dollars a year to keep an unpublished number unpublished? Does that seem plausible?"
Re:Revenue Stream (Score:5, Informative)
$5 per month is no longer in the realm of "nickel& dime", it's bare-faced robbery.
Re:Revenue Stream (Score:4, Informative)
I know reading TFA is considered bad form around these parts, but you might want to give it a shot from time to time.
Anyone on a prepaid cell phones lost a reasonable expectation of privacy, and can be tracked without warrant. If that's not a flagrant 4th amendment violation, I don't know what is.
Re:Money for nothing ...... (Score:5, Informative)
I call bullshit on you.
To make a phone book they have to collate a list of phone subscribers from the phone company. To exclude a subscriber, they simply don't turn over that subscriber's record to whoever makes the books. Or alternatively, the phone book company doesn't print the names of people who have the privacy bit set on their record. How can it possibly be so difficult?
How can it cost $5/month to skip over somebody's name?
What legal issues are there that would justify the same cost?
Since you're so smart maybe you can tell us exactly why.
Re:It's true, folks! (Score:5, Informative)
I wish they just cut the crap. Verizon has built a system where they can sell your listing for a profit. Some of that money is used to offset the cost of maintaining your line. Without that revenue stream they need to add a fee in order for you to be a profitable customer.
It reminds of the situation with desktops and Windows. Because of licensing arrangements, it is cheaper to buy a Windows prefab than to buy a machine with no os. Crazy but true.
Without certain features some products are not as profitable for vendors, so it is discouraging, but not surprising, that they would pass on the offset costs to the end-user.
Re:Money for nothing ...... (Score:5, Informative)
You're full of shit.
Phone numbers are published by a 3rd party. Once a year we do a SQL dump of our existing customers and send that over. That's how the number gets published. Our billing system has a flag: nonpublish and it's y/n
The SQL statement involved is so fucking trivial it's ridiculous. There is NO reason at all to charge for this based on the difficulty of excluding you.
Re:Money for nothing ...... (Score:5, Informative)
This is nothing more than a company thumbing their nose at regulators by saying "If we are forced to provide X as part of our service then we will do so in such a way that ensures nobody wants to use X". Such behavior is frowned on over here, it would land the company in court where they would likely be levied a fine with lots of zeros on the end. Verizon know this because they operate in Oz and somehow manage to handle unlisted Aussie numbers without the need for a recurring charge.
Re:Revenue Stream (Score:4, Informative)
Sure there was. In fact, it was the government requiring a certain percentage of loans be made in areas that historically default on mortgages that helped fuel the mortgage crisis.
Re:Revenue Stream (Score:4, Informative)
Those cheap prepaid phones don't have GPS, but they could do tower triangulation.
My deepest concern is that I'll be one of 6 dozen people whose cell timing and location fit some high profile crime find myself under extreme scrutiny by people I neither trust nor believe are interested in justice half as much as they are in feathering their prosecutorial careers in preparation for running for high office.
Sadly, few if any prosecutors are interested in justice or anything else besides furthering their careers. See: Innocence Project.