May 27th, 2015 – The Federal Communications Commission announced today that they were circulating a proposal to cut back at robocalls and the loophole laws that allow intrusive phone calls to occur, primarily by allowing carrier to enforce stricter rob-call blocking services to consumers and customers.
In a blog post on the official website, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler stated that
We received more than 215,000 complaints related to unwanted and intrusive calls and texts. The filer of one complaint detailed receiving 4,700 unwanted texts over a 6-month period. We’ve also seen reports of 27,809 unsolicited text messages over 17 months to one reassigned number, despite requests to stop the texts.
The Act, named the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, will propose over 20 pending petitions related to the protection of consumers, allow consumers to choose which phone calls they wish to receive. The FCC also green lights robocall blocking technology – stating that they can be used freely without violating call-competition rules.
Another potential loophole will redefine the definition of “autodialer” and include any technology or program that has the potential to dial random or sequential numbers. It is not clear however if this will limit the abilities of current industry standard autodialers. In addition, consumers who are inheriting an assigned number from someone else will not be subject to robocalls from the previous owner if the act passes.
There will be exceptions to this new set of rules, primarily allowing alerts of possible fraud, medication reminders, and crucial reminders for the health and safety will still be permitted – although the exceptions do not allow debt collection and marketing calls this same leeway.
You can read the full blog post on the FCC official website, located here.
What do you think of the new regulations proposed by the FCC, how does this affect you? Leave a comment below to let us know what you think!