A state Senator in New York, after consulting and working with a number of consumer advocacy groups, announced plans yesterday to introduce a bill that would require a caller obtain consent before placing a call to any individual and also establish a private right of action should the law be violated.
State Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Democrat from New York City, said his bill will also give consumers the right to revoke consent to be contacted by “any reasonable means.” The bill, if passed, would also require telephone carriers to provide their customers with free technology to block or redirect autodialed calls.
“Like so many New Yorkers, everyone in my family has been annoyed by robocalls on a near daily basis,” Hoylman said in a statement. “These robocalls are a scourge on the public-at-large, and my constituents have been vocal about the extent to which these calls infringe on their privacy and interrupt their daily lives.”
Hoylman worked with Consumers Union, the policy and advocacy division of nonprofit Consumer Reports, and the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), to draft the proposed legislation. Notice the lack of any representation from any industry or company that might be making those calls, many of which could be legitimate?
The right to revoke consent by “any reasonable means” was one of the few components to the Federal Communications Commission’s changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that an Appeals Court allowed to stand when it issued a ruling in March in a lawsuit filed by ACA International against the government agency.
The big issue for the ARM industry is the call blocking technology. Many agencies are finding their calls to individuals being blocked because those individuals have said that the calls are robocalls, when in fact they are legitimate collection calls. Those false positive blocks are incredibly hard to overturn, and incredibly easy for individuals to get blocked in the first place. The ARM industry has struggled to find a clear path to get blocked calls and phone numbers unblocked, only to have some other individual label the call as a robocall.
