Who Signed Up for the Do-Not-Call List?

Technology has made it increasing difficult to be “let alone” as the number of portals into homes and businesses continues to grow, and as access to those portals remains relatively easy. Fixed and mobile phones, fax machines, voice mail, email and instant messaging all represent opportunities for commercial interests to solicit consumers and invade their personal privacy in the process. This paper attempts to identify determinants of the value that individuals place on their privacy—that Constitutional right exalted by Justice Brandeis in his 1928 dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States. Legal scholars have identified several facets of personal privacy. We focus on individuals’ desire for “solitude” generally, and more specifically, their desire not to be interrupted by telemarketing calls and other unwanted phone solicitations. We treat actions taken by households to protect their privacy as expressions of the value they attach to their solitude. This occurs when households subscribe to a calling feature on a phone line and use it to block or screen incoming calls. Clear evidence of demand for privacy occurs when individuals register their phone number on a do-not-call (DNC) program which are then removed from telemarketers’ calling lists. We exploit a natural experiment conducted by the Federal Trade Commission when it began to collect phone numbers for a national do-not-call registry last year. That program registers landline and cellular phone numbers and penalizes all non-exempt telemarketers for calling them. The FTC list has been a big hit: more than 60 million phone numbers have been registered since it first began. What causes people to register their phone numbers with the DNC list? We discover some answers to this question by merging the collection of registered phone numbers with household demographic information. We are especially interested in the relationship between sign-ups to the DNC list and household income, composition, race and education when making this decision. We also attempt to use the pattern of DNC sign-ups to quantify: