Telemarketers turn off customers when they invade privacy

London Briefing: Many people in the US and Canada rarely answer their home phones unless they recognise the number displayed in caller ID. Having grown so weary of fending off calls from telephone sales people at all times of the day, some households now regard the phone with deep suspicion.

I have always hoped that the plague of telesales would remain an exclusively North American phenomenon but, as with most things, it has finally crossed the Atlantic.

It started with the utility companies. Mostly it was confined to the electricity suppliers trying to persuade you to buy your gas from them (and vice-versa) and BT urging you to come home. But now pretty much anything goes. Kitchen and conservatory manufacturers seem to be the most recent discoverer of phone selling and I guess it won't be too long before double-glazing makes a comeback.

The techniques vary, from hard to soft sell and from human to machine-based systems. Some of my friends have learned to identify the electronic clicks of an automated system that dials thousands of numbers simultaneously and signals back to the call-centre when someone has picked up a call: those clicks give you a split second to hang up before human contact is made and the selling begins.

Similar calls are now starting to be made to mobile phones, possibly because this offers a direct route to children. Some kids I know have been offered amazing deals at famous theme parks via their mobile phones. I guess adults in their home are fair game but hard selling to children would seem to require a regulatory response.

While telesales is a growth area, more traditional marketing techniques are in decline. As the TV audience fragments across the hundreds of available channels and people use the new recording technology to "time-slip" adverts out of (nearly) real-time TV watching, new sales techniques inevitably evolve.

When we only had four channels it was easy for advertisers to reach a mass audience. But the days of the mass audience are clearly numbered, reality TV notwithstanding. I suspect that caller-ID is going to be a "must have" for all of us very soon.

Advertisers must surely be aware that their new techniques run the risk of actively turning people off their products: overly repeated annoying TV ads occasionally had the same effect but it can only take one phone call to make most people determined never to touch the thing being sold. People resent the hijacking of their phones and the random invasions of privacy.

For all their faults, TV ads are predictable and, unlike the phone, the television can easily be silenced or switched off. For understandable reasons, we are much more reluctant to unplug our home phones. It is an unusual marketing strategy that risks annoying so many potential customers.

Another, far more sinister, phone ploy has also arrived and is called, I think, Phishing. This is where a plausible sounding person purports to be from your credit card company and asks if you recently bought a TV in New York. After you have told him that this is impossible an elaborate series of sensible sounding security questions are asked, culminating in an innocuous query about credit card details.

Given the context, it seems to be the most natural question in the world to ask. And people still fall for this, as they do when they are sent official-looking emails soliciting bank account details. The next time they see their credit card or bank statements a nasty surprise awaits them.

Another technique targeting mobile phones involves an announcement, via a text message, that you have won a major prize. The mere act of replying to some of these kinds of messages seems to involve very high costs to the user (and not much of a prize). Again, children would seem to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of ruse. As ever, scam technology runs ahead of law makers and regulators.

For most of us, all of this is merely irritating. And, each little phone call from the gas/electric/kitchen company is not a big deal. The warning messages I get, every time I log into my online banking accounts, about dodgy email requests for information are not, of themselves, particularly annoying. But, taken together the irritants begin to add up.