There’s some scaremongering going round on the office emails this morning, courtesy of this story on the BBC News website, detailing a new directory of mobile phone numbers.
The email going round says that “Early next week all UK mobiles will be on a directory which will mean that anyone will be able to access the numbers”, and links to the story above. It also states that you can opt out of the service, but you must do it before the end of the week to be certain that you’re ex-directory.
Now, the important thing here is that the story is linked to. But the thing is, no-one has read the bloody thing!
The story quite explicitly states that the directory only has 15 million numbers, out of 40 million adults who have mobile phones. And some of them (including me) have two mobiles, so I would conservatively put the number at 60 million+, especially when the mobiles of under-18s are considered.
So “all” is quite the scaremongering word, and is in fact false. But then that doesn’t make for quite as good a circular email, does it?
And the opt-out service is ongoing. There’s no deadline, no case of you being in the directory permanently if you don’t opt out today. Hell, the website is offline today anyway, no doubt as a result of this kind of scaremongering.
And it costs £1 to look up a single number, so to say that you’re going to be swamped by “cold calling and the general abuse that less scrupulous telesales people subject us to” is another falsehood.
It amazes me that no-one bothers to fact-check this kind of thing. The link to the relevant facts is genuinely in the middle of the damn email, yet people still forward it to friends and family. Likewise with anything about swine flu, and for us Londoners regarding the G8 protests: it’s all scaremongering, to create some FUD.
Sigh.
P.S. I like the word “scaremongering”.
