Flooded with text messages and advertising calls from your operator or – more often – from your former operator who tries to attract us back to him? Here’s what to do
by Alessandro Longo
Flooded with text messages and advertising calls from your operator or – more often – from your former operator who tries to attract us back to him? Here’s what to do
3 ‘of reading
There are new and more robust defenses to stem the river in flood. And we find them on the websites of the operators. Customers can automatically manage consents on their personal page. On the other hand, former customers can send an email to a specific address. Previously this possibility was offered by a few (H3G one of the pioneers; now the operator is in the Wind3 group) and often hidden. Finding the right email was very difficult, but now it is easier even if the situation is not optimal. Reason why this guide is useful, to orient yourself.
The tools for customers
The situation we have to counter is that, common to many users, of receiving an incessant number of messages (mostly) from their operator or former operator. There are more defense tools against your own, for example you can call him to revoke the consent or – more convenient and also more effective method since it is certain and it is not a verb volant – go to your own reserved page on the operator’s website. Everyone therefore has a privacy or marketing consent section where users can (or perhaps, must, it should be said) disable the authorization to receive these communications. We could discover more rumors about it and all active (even if we do not remember – strange case – when we authorized the operator to do so; perhaps they were rumors that the dealer of the sim has checked without asking us, on the contract). For example, on Tim we find four voices. Sending advertising material, direct selling, Tim’s market research. Individual profiling (of our habits). Sending advertising material from Tim’s partners. “Communication of personal data to the companies of the TIM Group and to the investee companies, which will process them for their own marketing purposes, with automated contact methods”. Different consents for activities that are only apparently similar to each other.
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The tools for non-customers
More difficult for former customers. They have to send an email. For Vodafone it is [email protected]. Wind3 asks you to write to [email protected] or [email protected] and which will then take 20 days to comply. For Tim: [email protected]. Tim is the only operator who for the request must indicate not only the telephone number, but also “the Tax Code, attaching a copy of the valid identity document of the owner of the telephone line concerned”. To be safe, let’s do it with others too. With Poste Mobile, on the other hand, there is no ad hoc email, but you are told to revoke your consent by writing to [email protected].
The Fastweb procedure is still different and more complex. Switch between former customers and those who have never had relations with Fastweb. If you have never been a Fastweb customer and have received commercial contacts from Fastweb, you can exercise the right to object (no longer receive calls) by filling out an online form, or by sending an email to [email protected] indicating your name, surname, tax code and telephone number on which you were contacted. “You will be eliminated from the contact lists used by Fastweb sales structures”. If you have been a Fastweb customer and want to exercise the rights of cancellation or portability of your personal data, you can do so by filling out another online form.
At the same time, Fastweb adds in the paragraph after (https://www.fastweb.it/adsl-fibra-ottica/privacy/) that you can use the email [email protected] (it is not clear whether this also applies to former customers ).
Waiting for the new register of oppositions
Of course it would be nice to have a single point of contact to which to send the request for revocation of consent for any company. This guide would be much more streamlined and we would not have to look for emails and methods, all different, on the operators’ websites.The single point would already be there, it is called the Opposition Register, but it is a pity that it still does not work with mobile numbers. Its revision has been planned (and overdue) for years and will perhaps finally arrive in the coming months. At that point it will be sufficient to contact the register to revoke all active consents, of any company, on its own number.