FCC plans ID mandate that could block anonymous use of prepaid burner phones

The National Network to End Domestic Violence described extensive concerns with the list of potential information the FCC may require collecting. The proposal “asks whether providers should exclude or subject to heightened scrutiny virtual addresses, shared office locations, PO boxes, and mail-forwarding services, and whether providers should rely on customer-characteristic ‘red flags’ to identify potentially suspicious customers,” the group said. “While these questions arise in the context of fraud prevention, they also implicate practices that survivors routinely use to protect themselves from being monitored or harmed by abusive actors.” The proposal “asks whether providers should collect copies of government-issued identification, verify information using public databases; consumer reporting agencies; financial institutions; and commercial records, and retain those records for four years after the customer relationship ends,” the group said. People fleeing domestic abuse “may be living in a shelter, transitional housing, a hotel, a car, a friend’s spare room, or another location they cannot safely disclose,” the group’s filing said. “Many rely on address confidentiality programs (ACPs), governmental programs that provide survivors with a substitute legal address and mail-forwarding services precisely because disclosure of a residential address can expose them to renewed violence.” Chao Jun Liu, a senior legislative associate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET that “collecting all this data is horrible for everyone’s privacy. You have to ask, do you trust the government to have that information at this current moment in time? A government that has proven that they are trying to centralize and weaponize your information.” Another filing opposing the plan came from the Consumer Access & Choice Coalition, which said it represents “small, nomadic Voice over Internet Protocol (‘VoIP’), 2nd-line application-based VoIP, and wireless service providers.” The industry group said the FCC should regulate abusive behavior by voice service providers that knowingly or recklessly facilitate illegal robocalls, and not impose limits on “ordinary consumer anonymity.” Requiring the collection of personal information could harm people seeking privacy without substantially lessening robocalls, the group said. “If applied without careful tailoring, these proposals would impose significant costs, privacy risks, cybersecurity exposure, and access barriers on lawful consumer-focused services and their users, while doing little to deter sophisticated illegal robocallers who can migrate to offshore providers, stolen or synthetic identities, compromised accounts, account farms, encrypted platforms, or other evasive channels,” the group said. The voice-provider group further argued that the plan “would raise serious legal questions, including whether Congress clearly authorized such a regime.” It said the FCC’s proposed rules could be challenged under the major questions doctrine, which can prevent federal agencies from making certain types of decisions without explicit instructions from Congress. The FCC docket has received numerous comments from individuals opposing the plan. There is a June 25 deadline for an initial round of comments and a July 27 deadline for reply comments. There’s no specific timeline for implementing rules, and it can take a few months after a comment period for the FCC to decide on a final plan.