Telephone canvassing soon to be banned?

The Senate has just adopted a bill aimed at putting an end to non-consented telephone canvassing. Consumer associations are now calling for its adoption as quickly as possible by the National Assembly in order to guarantee consumers’ right to peace of mind.

Intrusive prospecting

This bill proposed by Senator Pierre-Jean Verzelen finally paves the way for a ban by default on telephone canvassing. “For more than fifteen years, our respective associations have been fighting against real harassment of consumers, due to the myriad of unwanted commercial telephone requests on landlines but also mobile lines, which are particularly intrusive in their daily lives”explain these eleven associations, including UFC-Que Choisir, in a joint press release.

Indeed, according to them, “the French system is based on hypocrisy: the presumption that consumers naturally wish to be canvassed by telephone, with default authorization for telephone canvassing. » The Bloctel system, a list of opposition to telephone canvassing, has not been able to stop the phenomenon of mass unwanted calls. Thus, according to a survey carried out by UFC-Que Choisir in October 2024, 97% of French people say they are annoyed by commercial canvassing.

Adopt a default ban

As the associations point out, it has now been a decade since “successive governments have always refused to implement the opt-in, a general ban by default on telephone canvassing” However, this already effective system for emails and SMS had been requested by nearly half a million people as part of a petition launched by UFC-Que Choisir in 2020…

This opt-in system has already proven itself in many European countries, including Germany, England and Portugal. After the senators, consumer associations are now calling on deputies to vote massively on the text in order to “finally put an end to the scourge of unwanted calls, guarantee consumers’ right to peace of mind and better protect them against scams and consumer disputes. »

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