Here’s WHY we’ll never sell your information

September 18, 2026

A bad employee experience gave us reason to reassure you.

In today’s world this is an all-too-common story that’s probably even happened to you. One of our employees recently scheduled a trip and went online to order the whole package of air, hotel, and tickets. He had to give all his phone, email, credit card, and address information to the fine corporations he dealt with. Fair enough, they probably even legitimately needed it. But this isn’t a story about overly intrusive information collection (though there are links below about just that issue), it’s a story about companies abusing the privilege of having any of your information at all, why WE’LL never sell your information under any circumstances, and a few options you have to fight back.

Callmageddon begins

The story itself is pretty straightforward. Charles L. dealt with 3 companies on a Tuesday to set up his trip and one of them (at least) apparently sold his information to a data broker. The calls started Wednesday. From 6-freaking-45am Wednesday morning through 4pm a week later, scammers pounded him with a total of 116 junk calls including an incredible 44 of them in just one day! They’re tapering off now, but will undoubtedly continue for days, weeks, or months to come.

The days are gone when you could walk into a business, order a product or service, hand them cash, and walk away unencumbered. Now every business wants every shred of information about you for the smallest transaction so they can follow you forever. You can’t even stick a quarter into a parking meter anymore, you have to download an app and connect it to your bank!

Why it’s abusive

When you share your personal information it’s probably not out of trust, it’s likely that you have no choice. But even so, you are trusting that the company will keep it private. There is absolutely no reason for anyone not directly and necessarily involved in your transaction to EVER know anything about you or what you bought. There’s no more direct disrespect of a customer or client than treating them as a commodity to be bought or sold. And they’re selling us insultingly cheaply… a mailing list sells for $100-$600 per thousand contacts. Your privacy and peace of mind are apparently worth less than $60. If a company cares so little for something so important to you, there’s absolutely no reason to expect them to deliver quality or respect in any other dealings you may have with them.

Tom Dwyer wants your info too… here’s what we’ll do with it

We ask for your information because we intend to use it, but we’ll do it respectfully and for reasons you might hopefully want us to. Our article “It’s great to hear from us!” goes into detail but (beyond all the vehicle information) we’ll ask for three things- your phone, address, and email. What can you expect? We’ll use your phone to call with status when your vehicle’s being serviced, and we’ll use your address to send you service reminders every six months. We try to send one thing to your email every two weeks; either our Newsletter, a giveaway contest, service discounts, or some important news story or announcement. That’s it. You can opt out of any of these at any time and we’ll respect that decision too. (Though opting out of a phone number can make service awkward and we don’t recommend it!)

Fight back. Please.

It seems there’s precious little we can do to fight back against these… well, let’s call them “bad actors” to be polite. But little isn’t nothing and we want to give you a few rays of sunshine…

The most basic advice we got (and found online) was to not answer spam calls at all because the computer on the other end would “know” your phone number was active and would continue to call. In fact, we were told to just let ALL calls go to voicemail and return only the calls you want. Maybe that works for some folks, but it’s not the way we think phones should work.
The second most common suggestion was registering your number with the National Do Not Call List. This has been in existence since 2003 and may be actually useful, but maybe not. It has a long list of loopholes and exceptions and scammers have developed workarounds. Charles tried registering his phone on the third day of Callmageddon without noticeable results… maybe things will get better.
One of the more entertaining options is Jolly Roger Telephone Company. It’s a service that provides friendly, patient, extremely long-winded and wandering robots to answer telemarketer calls. It’s $1.99 a month, but you do get recordings of your bots fighting with their bots. Click here to hear some samples.
Finally, we’ll direct you to a guy who actually fought The Man. Friend-of-the-shop Don Merrill was living in Salt Lake City in 2009 and was getting a slew of “courtesy checks” from Capital One… you know the ones, you’ve gotten them yourself. Don sent almost 40 certified letters over a 2-year period begging them to stop with no result. So he sued them… and won. His interview on WNYC’s “The Takeaway” is here, and starts at about 1:21:30.

Never. Never ever. Never.

Tom Dwyer Automotive is built as much on integrity and respect as on quality auto repair. If we were to ever disrespect our clients by selling them to telemarketers we would DESERVE their spite and bile! We don’t want this to ever happen to you, which is WHY we’ll NEVER sell your personal information to anyone, for any reason, ever. Period. It’s just that simple.