Harassed by unsolicited calls, on the landline but now also on the mobile, by telephone sellers: energy, telephone services, insurance, contracts, loans and so on and so forth. Now the European Union has decided to put a brake on aggressive telephone marketing. As? Proposing a a single prefix to identify all operators that besiege us every day and that, in this way, would be recognizable by the number on the screen.
The proposal is included in the draft regulation on privacy that the European Commission presented in recent weeks. Brussels also hypothesizes that the States could impose a fee to assign these numbers and therefore the right to operate telephone marketing.
Will this solution also be adopted in Italy? It's too early to tell. Of course, this is a very delicate problem, because any regulation that is too restrictive could put you at risk a sector that employs 40 workers in our country alone. There is a problem and it is not easy to balance the needs of call centers and their "outbound" operations (facing outwards, to distinguish them from the "inbound" ones we turn to when we need assistance and we turn to ourselves to consumer switchboards) with those of millions of customers.
The numbers speak clearly: in Italy there are 115 million telephone linesand, between fixed and mobile. Only one and a half million are protected (but not even with the total guarantee of inviolability) from aggressive telemarketing calls. The opposition register, which can be activated on the website of the Privacy Guarantor, in fact it is used by around 1% of potential users. And even when they are used, it has not proved to be an effective tool: both because telephone directories have been distributed previously, and because consumers themselves leave traces of their private numbers too superficially (for example, by activating a loyalty card at the supermarket or a free wi-fi service in the hotel).
The bottom line is that calls go through, even on cell phones. Beyond the European proposal that will run its course, two possible ways out are being confronted in Italy. The one proposed by Conservative and Reformist Senator Anna Bonfrisco, linked to the Competition Law passed into the cavalry with the fall of the Renzi government. And that of Senator Sel Stefano Quaranta who aims to make a clean slate of the past and start over from scratch. But perhaps, given the uncertainties of Italian politics, the EU will do first.
