New Register To Weed Out Nuisance Calls

The government has submitted papers to Legco regarding setting up a Do-Not-Call register to stop the menace of unwanted calls by telemarketers.

Individuals will be able to submit their numbers to the register and telemarketers will not be allowed to call them after that.

Unsolicited sales calls have been a major complaint of Hong Kong residents with surveys showing an overwhelming majority of people are annoyed by them.

This was highlighted last year in the case of a woman who hung up calls from an unknown number 18 times, only for it to turn out that the calls were from a hospital where her husband had been admitted after an accident.

Calls for criminal liability on companies that authorise the making of cold calls were made during a public consultation exercise. The Commerce and Economic Development Bureau and the Department of Justice said they will study that suggestion in detail when drafting the law.

For now, the government says some non-statutory measures can be introduced to mitigate the problem of cold calls.

In the paper submitted to Legco, the government says the new register will be operated by the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, which already runs another register for pre-recorded messages, set up 10 years ago.

However, the government has ruled out the use of designated prefixes for telemarketers making cold calls, saying the social cost of implementing that is high and it would have little effect, being as some cold calls are made from outside Hong Kong.

The government also rejected proposals from the business community to operate a sector-by-sector register. It said this approach would cause a lot of confusion and would be hard to enforce.

It said it intends to subsidise call-filtering app operators – to strengthen data protection for their mobile applications.

The Legco paper also says provisions will be made to make sure that calls from hospitals and other important public-service providers are not inadvertently screened out.