Privacy Manager

The privacy manager sample disposition is specific to telephone surveys. Privacy manager services are telecommunications technologies that are available to households and businesses as an optional subscription from most local U.S. telephone companies. Many privacy manager services work with caller identification (caller ID) services to identify and block incoming calls that do not display a telephone number that the household has identified as a known number. Because very few households or businesses will have the name or telephone number of a telephone survey interviewing organization as a “known” number, privacy manager technologies make it significantly more difficult for telephone interviewers to contact households that subscribe to these services.

In addition to blocking calls from “unknown” numbers, most privacy manager services also block calls whose identification is displayed as anonymous, unavailable, out of area, or private. Callers with blocked numbers usually have the option to temporarily unblock their numbers so their calls can be connected. When interviewers dial a number that has privacy manager services, the interviewer will hear something like, “The person you are trying to reach does not accept unidentified calls. Your caller ID/telephone number was not received/known.” Interviewers then have the opportunity to identify who is calling. If the interviewer announces his or her name and organization, usually the phone then will ring and the household or business will hear the identification provided by the interviewer. At that point, the household or business can choose to accept the call, reject the call, send the call to a voice-mail system or answering machine, or send a “solicitor's rejection,” such as notifying the caller that “telemarketing calls are not accepted.”

The number of households and businesses with privacy manager services has increased as the number of telemarketing calls has grown in the past decade and as the cost of these services has dropped. As a result, many survey organizations have established “privacy manager” as a unique survey disposition—both to track the prevalence of these call outcomes and to help ensure that cases with these outcomes are managed properly. Finally, because privacy manager technologies make it more difficult to screen numbers in a sample, cases that have a call outcome of privacy manager usually are considered cases of unknown eligibility (because many times it is difficult or impossible for telephone interviewers even to determine whether the case is a household or not). Existing evidence suggests that the level of cooperation that eventually can be gained from repeated calling attempts to households with privacy manager is very low (<5%).