Wireless 411 Privacy Act

Three U.S. senators are pushing a bill to protect more than 250 million consumers from having their cell phone numbers listed in a 411 directory similar to directories available for residential phone numbers. Prospects of a cellular phone directory have raised fears about a flood of telemarketing via wireless calls and text messaging. While the Federal Communications Commission says those fears are unfounded, there are other privacy concerns at stake.

The wireless industry says it has no intention of creating such a directory, although it once did plan to do so. But the bipartisan authors of the Wireless 411 Privacy Act say they don’t want to take any chances, and they note that numbers are already available in at least one online directory service that has 90 million cell phone records.