Privacy Manager

A marketing ploy that has recently been driven into the ground by phone companies such as Ameritech. It claims to completely eliminate telemarketing, sales and private calls by sending the caller to a prompt which notifies them that the customer has Privacy Manager and allows the unidentified caller to identify him/herself.

The only thing this $10/month feature really stops, however, is prank calls. If a telemarketer really wants to annoy me, he or she will leave their name and still make my phone ring.

Another thing this feature (which is $12/month, and that includes the $8 monthly fee for Caller ID) stops is those damn auto-dialers (those devices that telemarketers use to call multiple people at once and hang up on everyone except the first person who answers). These don't even get through with Privacy Manager.

Before I had Privacy Manager, I used to get those kinds of calls almost on an hourly basis. Since then, I get maybe one telemarketing call per week.