On the same day that she signed a series of new bills — including one targeting debt collection — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul also signed two other new bills into law that target robocalls and enact measures that will likely see more calls being automatically blocked by phone carriers.
The first bill — S.6267/A.268 — follows regulation that has been enacted at the federal level and allows voice service providers to proactively block calls that come from certain numbers, calls that the carriers deem most likely to be illegitimate because they don’t originate from numbers that are allowed to make outgoing calls, or because the true identity of the caller has been masked.
“New Yorkers are fed up with annoying, predatory robocalls, and we’re taking action to stop them,” Gov. Hochul said, in a statement. “This legislation will enable telecom companies to prevent these calls from coming in in the first place, as well as empower our state government to ensure that voice service providers are validating who is making these calls so enforcement action can be taken against bad actors.”
The second bill — S.4281a/A.585a — requires voice service providers in New York to adopt the STIR/SHAKEN protocols to authenticate that calls are coming from the number appearing in the Caller ID window. The New York Public Service Commission will have the authority to oversee compliance with the protocols.
“One of the problems with the federal standard is that every service provider can make their own choices in terms of blocking things and not blocking things,” said Paul Schmitt, a research computer scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, in a published report. “If the public service commissioner actually says we are going to have a standard rubric for all of our telecom providers, that might change things.”
