Dave Gorman on the 118 800 mobile phone numbers directory

Exactly. The point of this is not one celeb who's number inadvertantly became public domain, it's the rest of us poor sods who are forced to use our unique contact information like phone numbers and mailing addresses to get regular services, and then watch that information get bought and sold until it ends up in the hands of scumbags, at which point the junk mail, automated phone calls and spam texts become a denial of service attack which is very hard to guard against.

>> "Not wishing to defend 118 800, but after the first prank call from that service he could go "ex-directory" and get no further calls."

Yeah that doesn't scale too well. What about when there's hundreds of such services? It should either be strictly opt-in, or failing that have a centralized shared opt-out system.

Not necessarily - there's still voicemail to consider.