Federal Trade Commission:

I write to present my opinion on current telemarketing practice.

1) Current practice allows telemarketers to invade my privacy, and they do so at my financial expense. The laws currently allow telemarketers to utilize a service for which I solely have paid. Specifically, my telephone is a private number, a private line, and a private device which I use to communicate with those to whom I have correspondence. I pay for the installation, the maintenance, and the retention of my telephone service for private use, and while I put my telephone number is in the local directory, it is not a number for marketing nor for business other than my own.

2) In current actual *practice*, it is the obligation of the private individual to enforce laws when telemarketers are in violation of telemarketing laws and costs the individual too in time and money.

a. The private individual to inform the telemarketer that private line are not accepted (time after time, despite asking verbally or in writing to be placed on the no-call list).

b. The private individual must call to have names removed from marketing lists on which he or she was placed without request or permission.

c. The private individual must keep a lsit of callers who are in violation, calling repeatedly after requested to place the number on the no-call list.

d. The telemarketers have equivocated to move around laws by saying, "we do not keep a no-call list, so we cannot place your name on it." They change their term to a "no contact list", which they have not disclosed except when the exasperated private person presses the point to be placed on a list prohibiting them from contact again.

4) For the above, serious reasons, I aks you to prihibit altogether a marketer from calling a private number without prior permission to do so, gained either verbally or in writing by an individual. Merely because I exist, because my name is in a phone book or because I bought something from a company who sold (!) my number to a telemarketing company is *not* permission to contact me.

Please protect my right to privacy.

Thank you.

Yours,

Dr. K. James Gilchrist