Farhad Manjoo

Telemarketing is an enormous business that hires millions of people and contributes to billions in commerce every year, but it is suddenly reeling under what insiders describe as a politically expedient bit of regulation. It surprises and offends telemarketers that, of all the scourges we suffer, lawmakers made this one a priority. Telemarketing is an annoyance, but that’s all it is, people in the industry insist. Unsolicited sales calls won’t give you cancer or heart disease or make you fat. Telemarketing doesn’t damage the environment. It doesn’t cause car accidents. Telemarketers don’t hurt kids or animals. They aren’t suspected of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Yet politicians of every stripe are united behind the issue, and they’ve come up with a solution — the do-not-call list — that experts say will devastate telemarketing.

So telemarketing will die. “Where’s the bad news?” you’re probably wondering.

In the United States in 2001, telemarketing companies employed 4 million people and generated $274 billion in sales, according to the WEFA Group, an economic research firm. The Federal Trade Commission, which set up the National Do Not Call Registry, estimates that by Oct. 1 — the date on which telemarketers will be barred from calling the numbers on the list — at least 60 million phone numbers will be off-limits to sales calls.

After that, says Tim Searcy, executive director of the American Teleservices Association, employment in his industry will plummet. Two million people will more or less instantly be put out of work, he says. That’s just an estimate, and it’s in Searcy’s interest to play up the horrors that the new law will cause, but his theory is not completely unbelievable. If half the phones in the country will no longer accept marketing calls, it’s not unreasonable to expect that half the people who work in the industry will no longer be needed — and that, certainly, won’t be good for the depressed economy.

The problems are compounded, Searcy says, when you consider the kinds of people telemarketing attracts. The industry hires an unusually large number of single mothers, people who are just getting off welfare programs, and people with physical disabilities; and most of its call centers are in rural areas, places where jobs are already scarce. When telemarketers lose their jobs, they’ll have a hard time finding something else.

“There are towns where the largest single employer is a telemarketing firm,” Hamilton says. “The local McDonald’s only needs 10 or 15 burger flippers. It can’t absorb thousands. Where are all those other people going to go? They’re going to go on welfare.”

Critics of telemarketing don’t dispute that this new rule is going to cause economic hardships; they say the hardships are worth it. “It’s a social welfare issue,” says Robert Bulmash, who heads Private Citizen, a pioneering anti-telemarketing firm. The new rule might cause thousands of telemarketers to suffer, but millions of the rest of us will be better for it, he says. “Let’s say that 10,000 handicapped people are working in the industry,” he says. “What about the 10 million handicapped people who can’t get to the phone when it rings, and who feel they have to get to it because this might be the one call that they’ve been waiting for?”

But the do-not-call list is open not only to the aged or the infirm; it’s open to every healthy American who’s physically capable of answering the phone but who feels, somehow, that he or she has a right not to be bothered if there’s a salesperson on the other end. In a free country, what’s so sacred about the phone that it should be exempt from commerce? And, if we do have a right not to be annoyed via the phone, how can politicians claim that they’re allowed to infringe upon that right in order to give us political messages — as they do in this regulation? People in the telemarketing industry see this as massive hypocrisy, and it makes them angry.

And while one is loath to defend them, these faceless, fast-talking people who call us during dinner, perhaps it’s time someone did. Telemarketing isn’t a crime. It’s a profitable business responsible for legitimate employment. Yet it’s just been regulated out of existence, and the country is applauding.

The FTC, which is mandated by Congress to review telemarketing rules every five years, first proposed the creation of a do-not-call list in January 2002. The commission asked the public to comment on the idea, and within a few months it was flooded with more than 60,000 opinions. The “overwhelming majority” of these people supported the new rule, the government says.

Browsing through the comments, you see a country of virtually one mind regarding telemarketers — Stop them! People are fed up by the number of calls they receive every day, by the attitude of the salespeople — they’re “rude,” they “do not understand the words ‘not interested’” — and by a feeling of powerlessness over the telephone.

“When one is called on a Sunday morning with the intention of discussing burial plans, it’s gone too far,” one woman who identified herself as a senior citizen wrote. In some comments, there is, too, a sense that American society is quickly becoming nothing more than a culture of pitchmen and their products, and that the home should be a refuge from the constant drone of capitalism. “It first started with the door-to-door salesman, then the telephone marketers, next was the fax, e-mail and now Internet, pagers and cell phones. When will it stop?!” asks Matthew Damba, a resident of Virginia.

“I think there are two levels of anxiety that these calls create,” says Robert Bulmash, of Private Citizen. “To some it’s the calls themselves. But then there’s another feeling which perhaps can’t be cogitated on the part of the victim — it’s not the calls themselves but the sense that you’re nothing more than sheep for the telemarketers to graze on, that you’re being seen not as a person with rights but as a source of revenue.”

Bulmash is right: The industry does see us as a source of revenue, but that’s probably because we are, despite our complaining, rather too quick to buy stuff over the phone. On average, says Searcy of the American Teleservices Association, an American household makes three purchases per year in response to sales calls. In 2001, according to the WEFA Group, telemarketing purchases represented 4 percent of all sales to consumers in the United States, an enormous slice of economic activity. Before the imposition of the do-not-call list, WEFA estimated that by 2006, about $403 billion in sales would be made by telemarketers. By way of comparison, just $34 billion in retail sales were made over the Internet in 2001 — but imagine the hue and cry if the government proposed regulations (such as, at the very least, the imposition of a sales tax) on e-commerce.

One reason companies like selling over the phone is that it’s extremely cheap to do so. During the past decade, long-distance telephone charges have fallen dramatically, so if “I call you and spend 18 seconds on the phone, at six-second increments that call has cost me about a penny,” says Bulmash. The telemarketer hasn’t made a sale, but for just a penny the company has dropped its message into a customer’s ear. “If I were to send that same person a mailing it would cost me 25 cents apiece,” Bulmash says.

In the 1990s, the industry became even more efficient through the adoption of what might be termed the assembly-line method of telemarketing. This was made possible by a technology called the “predictive dialer,” and you can blame it for making your life hell. The predictive dialer is a computer that initiates all the calls in a large call center. It dials numbers plucked from a database, and after screening out dead lines, busy signals and answering machines, it routes live calls to available representatives. The dialer allows salespeople to spend most of their time — up to 55 minutes out of every hour — making pitches. But the device is annoying to folks at home. Predictive dialers are responsible for the few seconds of silence you’re greeted with when you answer a telemarketing call; the lag is caused by the dialer looking for a sales rep available to make a sale to you. Because the dialers typically dial more numbers than there are representatives in a call center, the devices also hang up on a number of calls answered by people at home, a phenomenon that many find creepy.

Technology allowed telemarketers to make more calls and, consequently, more money, but it also turned the industry into a pariah. Telemarketers could now make tens of millions of calls every night, and Americans were furious about it. Around the country, politicians, naturally, saw an opportunity to act. The federal government, in fact, is late to the party — most states have already imposed their own do-not-call lists.

Insiders say that the industry was quite aware that its actions were angering Americans, and telemarketers did make attempts at reform. Meetings were held, proposals were floated, and initiatives were agreed to. But perhaps because the money was so good, telemarketing companies did little to change their ways. Jon Hamilton says that he was once at a telemarketing conference and “as part of my presentation, I said that the biggest surprise to me has been the lack of panic on the part of the industry.” When he said that, someone in the audience yelled, “We call Jon ‘Chicken Little!’” That was “a little funny,” Hamilton says, “but my point was that a lot of companies have been hiding their heads in the sand.”

Clearly, some in the industry still believe that they have done nothing wrong. The American Teleservices Association, the most hard-nosed of the trade groups representing telemarketers, maintains that its members have nothing to apologize for. That millions of people have signed up to keep their phones off-limits to salespeople may indicate that people want to reduce the number of ads they’re shown every day, the group says, but it doesn’t mean that people hate sales calls. “I think unfortunately we’re in a society in which commercial messages bombard us all the time,” executive director Searcy says. “Where you can say, ‘No, I don’t want to receive commercial messages anymore,’ people will do it. If I told you that you didn’t have to see television ads anymore, would you watch them?”

Asked if he thought his industry has an image problem, Searcy said: “I don’t know an industry that doesn’t have an image problem. Airlines have an image problem, Catholic priests have an image problem, journalism has an image problem. So everyone has an image problem — you pick your poison.”

At the same time that it created the do-not-call list, the FTC also issued telemarketing rules that would seem to go far in curbing the industry’s worst practices. The commission ordered telemarketers to set their predictive dialers to “abandon” — that is, hang up on — no more than 3 percent of the calls made, and it prohibits call centers from masking their phone numbers from caller I.D. devices, which has been a common practice in the industry. Some telemarketers object even to these rules, but many say that they seem like commonsensical, necessary reforms. The rules won’t prompt us to love, or really even tolerate, telemarketers, but they will probably reduce the number of calls that are made, and we’d have an easy way to identify who’s on the other end before we pick up the phone.

The national do-not-call list, however, will destroy the industry — everyone in the telemarketing business seems to agree with that assessment. Experts provide various theories about why this will occur, but the fundamental reason seems to be this: Americans think they don’t like telemarketing calls, but they’re wrong. Americans believe they want to be on a do-not-call list, but their past actions — namely their purchases — betray their true feelings. The FTC says that the do-not-call list is justified because it merely gives people a choice over whether they’d like to receive sales calls; according to that theory, the people who actually do buy things from telemarketers won’t add their numbers to the registry, and the industry will not suffer at all. But that analysis is faulty, the industry says. In the abstract, everyone hates to be sold to — you hate it when commercials interrupt your favorite TV show, you hate the “intrusive” ads displayed on your favorite Web site, you hate being handed pamphlets on the street, and you hate being called by a telemarketer who promises “a fantastic deal.”

If given the choice, we’d all say we prefer not to see any commercial messages unless we ask for them — but we’d all be lying. The fact is that even though we dislike advertisements in general, we do like specific ads, the ones for products that happen to appeal to us. And many Americans will sign up for the do-not-call list under the impression that they do not want to buy things over the phone, but they’re lying, too. Some significant number of people who will sign up have in fact purchased something — a phone service, a credit card, a magazine or newspaper subscription, or season tickets to the symphony — after a telemarketer has called them and asked them to do so. And, if the right deal came along in the future, they would do it again, too.

The national do-not-call list, says Hamilton, makes it exceptionally easy for Americans to exercise a choice that they probably cannot make rationally. “Many of the state lists or the [Direct Marketing Association's] list asked you to think about whether that’s what you wanted to do when you signed up,” he says. “The federal list was set up so it would be a knee-jerk reaction.” You could have one bad incident with a telemarketer and decide to keep your number permanently off-limits from all of them. Moreover, he says, “there are people who are going to sign all their friends up, too, because they’re nuts! There’s no checks and balances.”

If the millions of people who do in fact buy from telemarketers decide to put their numbers on the do-not-call list, the effect on the country’s ailing economy will not be good. Billions of dollars of economic activity will not take place, and, more critically, millions of people will lose their jobs. Recently, the Direct Marketing Association, an industry trade group, sent out an e-mail survey to 200 of the largest telemarketing companies in the country. Because only 31 of the 200 returned the surveys, it’s unclear how accurate the results may be — but they’re nevertheless instructive.

The DMA found that 60 percent of all telemarketing sales representatives are women, and 25 percent are single mothers. More than a quarter are students, a third are minorities, and 5 percent are physically disabled. “Moreover, 10 percent of the sales representatives were reported to be immediately off welfare,” the DMA said in its comments to the FTC. “Therefore, it is clear that in addition to employing many people, telemarketing, through flexible hours and workplace, allows for great diversity in employment opportunities. Many use telemarketing as a first job opportunity when entering the workforce from school or welfare.”

Telemarketers are not unionized, and there was no labor lobby fighting for their welfare in Washington during debates over the do-not-call list. Still, many of them sent in letters to the FTC — some were forced to do so by their employers, but others seem to have done it of their own accord — and their opinions are at least as passionate as those from people who say they’re upset with too many calls. “I am a disabled college student who has relied heavily in the past on telemarketing jobs to help make ends meet,” wrote a Florida resident named J. Edward Resmondo Jr. “Telemarketing means jobs. These restrictions might very well cost the people who can least afford it the opportunity to work, which in my case it could cost me the opportunity to finish my college education. I believe that your efforts would be better focused on fraud and not the legitimate marketers whom I have worked for in the past and will work for in the near future.”

If you don’t care about the plight of these workers, there may be one other reason for you to consider putting up with the annoyances of telemarketing — it probably makes many services cheaper for you. If companies that currently market their services over the phone are forced to now get to you in another, costlier way, there’s a chance that the price you pay for goods and services will edge up slightly. For example, Avery Abernethy and Randolph Beard, professors of marketing and of economics at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., theorize that telephone service has probably become cheaper and better for Americans in part due to telemarketing. In a research report they submitted to the FTC, they point out that people who subscribe to long-distance telephone service often receive calls from other companies offering them better deals. The possibility that you could be so easily snatched away by a rival forces your own phone company to keep your rates low and your service quality high — which means, essentially, that everyone’s rates stay low.

The theory is applicable beyond just long-distance telephone service, Beard says. In general, “advertising is a tool that companies use to raid their rivals’ customers,” he says. “Making advertising more expensive” — which is what the telemarketing rule will do — “makes raiding customers more expensive, and that reduces one of the incentives for firms to provide quality service.”

It appears that lawmakers considered few of these arguments when they were deciding to institute the do-not-call list. Congress took just a few days to debate the Do-Not-Call Implementation Act, the law that allows the FTC to collect from telemarketers the money to set up the registry. In February, the law passed the House with just seven members opposed, and it passed the Senate unanimously.

Lawmakers basked in the opportunity to show voters that they were actually doing something to make people’s lives much better. In one committee hearing on the bill, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., was pointing out that consumers were “plagued by unwanted, intrusive, unsolicited telemarketing” when, according to the Associated Press, “Markey’s remarks were interrupted by the loud ringing of his cellphone. Answering the call, he said, ‘No, I don’t want to change my phone service. How did you get my cellphone number? I’m in a congressional hearing right now.’” The AP added that “Markey’s staff said after the briefing that the congressman had turned up the volume on his phone and arranged to receive the call to make his point about intrusive telemarketing.”

When he signed the do-not-call bill, President Bush, too, played up the idea that people have a right not be bothered at home. “Unwanted telemarketing calls are intrusive, they are annoying, and they’re all too common,” Bush said. “When Americans are sitting down to dinner, or a parent is reading to his or her child, the last thing they need is a call from a stranger with a sales pitch. So we’re taking practical action to address this problem.”

What Bush did not mention, though, is that under the new regulations, he and every other politician will still have the right to call you whenever they want to ask you for money or votes. Some members of Congress had objected to this idea. Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who heads the Congressional Privacy Caucus, had proposed an “opt-in” model that would have prohibited all unsolicited calls, even calls from politicians, unless you added your name to a kind of “do call” list. “He feels like if we’re going to pass a law we can’t exempt ourselves,” said Samantha Jordan, a spokeswoman. “You have to make it across the board.” Not surprisingly, Barton’s idea didn’t fly; most lawmakers seemed to be OK with limiting sales calls, but they considered their own calls too good for voters to miss.

Telemarketers say this exemption is the height of hypocrisy. “What they’ve done is taken a huge interstate of commerce and closed it down to one lane and reserved it for themselves,” said Searcy, of the American Teleservices Association. Hamilton said, “Since the start of telemarketing legislation they’ve always exempted themselves because it’s their most powerful fundraising tool. It’s a very powerful tool, and they know it.”

Bulmash, the critic of telemarketing at Private Citizen, says that people who hate sales calls aren’t likely to appreciate political calls. “Under the law, George Bush can walk into my home and summon me to the phone as if I were nothing more than his Pavlovian dog,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s fundraising or political or sales. When I cross the threshold of my front door, I’m in my home. That’s one place in the world where a person has supremacy, and nobody can present any speech to me. It’s a fundamental right. I define the right to privacy as Justice Louis Brandeis did — it’s the right to be left alone.”

The ostensible justification for allowing politicians to bother you with their phone calls is that their right to free speech trumps your right to be left alone. Political speech is sacred, they say, and limiting it would have a deleterious effect on democracy. That is not an entirely self-serving argument. It’s probably true that the courts would be unwilling to uphold a law that prohibits politicians from calling voters. Courts have already cited the First Amendment in rulings about laws that place limits on charity fundraising calls.

But if politicians and charities have a First Amendment right to call you, don’t corporations have the same right, too? Courts generally accord more limited protection to “commercial speech,” so it’s possible that judges will have no problem with the FTC’s new regulations; but several trade groups and companies have filed separate lawsuits against the commission over the new rules, and many say that the law is not “narrowly tailored” enough to protect their rights. The industry says that the government is charged with regulating fraud, but the do-not-call list sweeps up many lawful telemarketing firms into the net. Searcy says that the ban on sales calls “is an unlawful intrusion on legitimate commercial speech that breaks the First Amendment.”

“Does anybody like to get a phone call at dinner?” asks Errol Copilevitz, an attorney who’s fought many telemarketing laws on behalf of nonprofit organizations. Of course not, he says. But unless the government gives us the opportunity to opt out of all of life’s annoyances, why single out telemarketing? “I don’t like to be bothered at the airport by people with unusual religious persuasions,” Copilevitz says. “But there’s some price that you pay for all kinds of freedom.”

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

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Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”