The National Do Not Call Registry is getting off to a shaky start, at least in terms of its on-line security. As several readers have pointed out, the whole web registration process for the anti-telemarketing list has major security holes.
The basic problem is that, in signing up on the web to bar telemarketers from calling your phone number, the verification process requires only an e-mail address that may not belong to the person who owns the phone number. “Leave it to the federal government to botch this,” wrote one reader. “People are signing up in droves, and they undercut the whole concept by leaving it open to tampering? Ridiculous.”
As I saw myself when I registered my phone numbers, all you have to do to get on the list is respond to a confirmation email that is sent to whichever address you supply. Not the best design, but what’s worse is that some readers reported it was also possible to have the phone number removed by using email address, including a different one than the one you used to register it. On Sunday, July 6th, I tried this, and I got a message back saying that “at this time, the National Do Not Call Registry is no longer taking deletions on line.”
That’s a good step, since the last thing we need is for telemarketers to easily remove everyone from the Do-Not-Call list just before they do their phone-spam thing. Yes, it’s seems improbable that anyone is going to spend a great deal of time putting phone number on the list that don’t belong to them, and the owners of those numbers probably wouldn’t object anyway. But that security hole has to be closed too, or it will make it too easy for the telemarketers to attack the validity of the list. The National Do Not Call Registry is a great idea, let’s just hope the bureaucrats can make a quick fix.
9:20:38 AM 
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