Hong Kong government cracks down on cold-calling with new do-not-call register proposal
Its move implies telemarketers who call numbers on the register may be subject to legal sanctions
After more than a decade of public pressure to get tough on telemarketers making cold calls, the government has proposed to set up a statutory do-not-call register managed by Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog to screen out nuisance callers.
The move implies telemarketers may be subject to legal sanctions if they continue to call numbers listed on the register by people who do not want to be disturbed.
The government already runs a do-not-call register that was set up in 2007 to shut out unsolicited electronic messages and recorded calls, but officials have resisted widespread demands to expand the register to also block person-to-person calls.
Rampant cold calling by telemarketers in Hong Kong could become a criminal act
A key reason cited by authorities in the past was the prospect of an estimated 20,000 telemarketers losing their jobs, but that was back in 2014, and it was not addressed in the latest proposal by the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau. A public consultation on the issue conducted from May to July last year gathered more than 3,700 written responses.
A document prepared for a Legislative Council panel on information technology and broadcasting shows that the bureau wants to ban telemarketers from calling people without their prior consent.
The plan is to have the privacy commissioner act as a one-stop shop to administer the statutory register and enforce the new rule.
The bureau rejected suggestions to have telemarketers use designated prefixes that could be identified in advance by people receiving their calls, saying marketers could call from numbers without such prefixes, and from outside the city.