Compliance with the do-not-call list has been good, regulations regarding free credit reports are being hammered out, review of a potential do-not-email list is pending and the Federal Trade Commission is moving ahead with enforcement efforts for the few bad apples in the barrel, according to J. Howard Beales III, the Commission’s director of consumer protection.
The best news Beales offered the industry was that with nearly 60 million registered numbers on the federal do-not-call list, the agency had received 300,000 complaints. “One complaint for every 200 numbers is remarkably good compliance,” he said.
Of those, most were against entities that had only one slipup. Only a handful of miscreants merited multiple complaints.
The Commission is also reviewing comments made regarding changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, specifically a requirement mandating that all credit agencies make reports available to consumers once a year. The FTC is looking at comments and preparing its final ruling, which is due June 16.
The FTC is examining how consumers could receive reports from all three credit bureaus via a single telephone call, and proposing to phase in the offer geographically and gradually, moving across the U.S. from west to east over a nine-month period, in an effort to avoid a crush of consumers demanding their credit status.
A bit more unsettlingly, the Commission is moving ahead with investigating the viability of a do-not-e-mail list. Beales is reviewing a draft recommendation this week, and anticipates meeting Congress’s June 16 deadline for his report, which includes input from vendors, the affected communities, public comment, consultations on technical aspects from non-vendors and analysis of the magnitude of the spam problem.
“It’s no secret that we have been concerned about enforceability for the do-not-e-mail system from the beginning,” Beales said.
Beales went out of his way to stress that the current mandate from Congress requires only that the Commission report on the list’s viability.
“Congress required us to come up with plan and timetable for a do-not-e-mail registry. It didn’t require us to do it, or give us the resources we would need to do it,” he said.
Beales anticipated that there would be a hearing no matter what the Commission recommends. But he did note that, unlike the do-not-call list, there is no concurrent procurement track for the do-not-e-mail list. For one thing, the magnitude of procurement would be much greater. For another, while the reaction to the do-not-call list was a bit more certain going in, the fate of the do-not-e-mail list is much more nebulous.
“I can’t imagine putting out a proposal and a procurement request” for the do-not-e-mail list, he said.
Not that his agency hasn’t been active in current e-mail regulation. On April 19, it published changes for sexually explicit e-mail labels in the Federal Register. The changes allow the warning notice in the subject line for such messages to be shortened, providing a little more space for the sender to describe the contents. This change takes effect May 19.
Beales also detailed the frustrations the FTC has encountered in tracking spammers internationally. “People point their finger at [the U.S.] and say, ‘You are the source of all spam.’ They have realized quickly that passing an opt-in law doesn’t make the problem go away,” he said.
The FTC has aggressively pursued 60 cases across the globe, with each one requiring a sequence of subpoenas to determine who was behind the unsolicited messages.
“When you find that person, that is the first time you know if you’ve got a big fish or little fish. And they may or may not be in the U.S.,” he said, adding that many countries break anti-spam activities and fraud among two organizations, making coordinating international enforcement difficult.
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