New Trump FCC Plan To ‘Fight Robocalls’ Raises Red Flags And Major Privacy Concerns

from the bad-ideas-from-terrible-people dept

We’ve talked a lot about how Americans have somehow accepted the fact that our voice networks are now saturated with scammers, fraudsters, and robocallers (no, that’s not something that happens in well run, functionally regulated countries).

I’ve also explained for years how the U.S. government solutions to the problems are usually ineffective because they’re endlessly trying to create rules (or undermine existing ones) to carve out exceptions for big “legitimate corporations,” which routinely engage in the same sleazy behavior as scammers.

Regulatory capture and corruption means that you wind up with a lot of performative solutions that sound good, but don’t fix anything. And some of the progress we had made on robocalls is being undermined by the Trump administration’s brutal assault on the federal regulatory state, something that still, somehow, isn’t getting enough public and press attention.

Now the Trump administration is cooking up a new “fix” that once again isn’t likely to fix the robocall problem (because our consumer protection regulators don’t function and the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about the subject anyway), but is likely to introduce all manner of new privacy and surveillance headaches. If it’s even implemented.

In late April, the Trump FCC announced it was considering the development of new “Know Your Customer” rules requiring that the buyer of any new phone present a government ID, a physical address, a full legal name, and an existing phone number at the point of sale. This has raised eyebrows both among activists and telecom industry lawyers, albeit for understandably different reasons.

A Trump FCC press release frames this new layer as a big fix for robocalls:

“We must bring meaningful robocall relief to consumers. The FCC is attacking the problem of illegal robocalls at every point in the call path in order to help consumers and restore trust in America’s voice networks. These proposals set the stage for significant advancement toward those goals by aiming to get providers to take accountability and step up their game in our shared battle against illegal robocalls.”

Telecom lawyers are nervous because the rules propose a $2,500 penalty, per call, per carrier, in a country that sees around 4.2 billion robocalls per month. So yeah, in a theoretical country where we actually had functioning consumer protections this would be quite a shift.

But accountability requires consumer protection enforcement, and this is Brendan Carr. A guy who generally doesn’t believe in holding major corporations accountable for literally anything. And who believes in defanging the federal regulatory state. It’s once again this interesting intersection between the Trump administration’s claims, and their very unsubtle effort to lobotomize government.

Which is to say I’m not even sure this proposal passes, much less sees any enforcement. And if it does pass, and does get enforced, it likely won’t actually help stop robocalls, because that would require a government willing to be tough on the biggest telecom giants which have historically not done enough to police fraud on their networks (at points because they were profiting from the fraud).

So what is Brendan Carr actually thinking? Like all dutiful autocrats, he’s thinking about his administration’s own power, and he’s thinking about surveillance.

There are, of course, numerous instances where you might want legal but covert ownership of a cell phone (a refugee seeking government punishment, a domestic abuse victim fleeing an abusive relationship, a journalist trying to protect a source identity, an activist planning a demonstration). Reclaim the Net is particularly concerned on the restrictions impacting the prepaid cell phone market:

“The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.”

So yeah, if Brendan Carr, a censorial autocratic zealot with a history of disdain for corporate accountability and consumer protection, is suddenly pitching you a quick and easy solution for a complicated consumer-facing issue, you should probably raise a skeptical eyebrow. Especially if you’re a journalist.

Filed Under: brendan carr, fcc, identification, know your customer, prepaid, privacy, robocalls, scams, surveillance, wireless