Nobody was prepared for the rush when the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse launched its consumer hot line last November.
Minutes after a kickoff news conference, the phones lighted up in the offices at the University of San Diego's Center for Public Interest Law.
"At times, we were getting two and three calls a minute," says project director Beth Givens.
Although the calls have leveled off to 300 to 500 a month, the leading consumer question hasn't changed: "How do I get rid of junk mail?"
Close behind: "How do I get rid of telemarketing calls?"
(For some answers, see the accompanying story.)
"It was clear to us we had struck a nerve," Givens says.
The new hot line had tapped into the bottled-up anger and confusion of consumers caught in a marketing revolution that began to explode in the 1980s.
Direct marketing, which refers to the selling of merchandise by mail or telephone, is as old as the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. But two factors have driven recent growth:
* The development of mini-computers and specialized software allows any business or individual to match names and addresses and merge additional data. The results are mailing lists that identify individuals by address, sex, age and credit-card purchases--a far cry from the 1970s when the best a retail company could do was send mailings based on ZIP code.
* The American consumer is increasingly willing to shop from home. More than half the adult population ordered merchandise by mail or telephone in 1992, according to the Direct Marketing Assn.
There is a plus side. Precisely targeted consumers are getting mailings about items they might want. "All I did was order a composter and now I get about a dozen organic gardening catalogues a month," says a Valley homeowner.
However, there's a downside. Not only is the sheer volume of junk mail starting to look like too much of a good thing, but there is growing suspicion about invasion of privacy.
Says Givens: "People are concerned about the technology--who has access to their credit reports, how personalized junk mail ends up in their postal box."
What the hot-line callers express, she says, is a "rather fuzzy notion that their name and address somehow get sucked out of the atmosphere into a computer."
To educate the public, her staff of five has developed the hot line, a computer bulletin board and a sheaf of fact sheets on privacy issues.
