Privacy Latest: EU Promises; FCC Ponders

The EU says it expects to replace and improve upon its suspended Safe Harbor agreement with the US within three months; the US FCC continues to consider issues surrounding Do Not Track and TCPA; and some telephone researchers find ingenious ways to survive the latter.


In late September Yves Bot, the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) threw wide open the issue of personal data transfer between the EU and USA when he recommended an invalidation of the existing Safe Harbor agreement regulating such transfer. Bot said that in his opinion, 'surveillance carried out by US intelligence services hinders fundamental rights of European citizens', but in effectively annulling Safe Harbor without having anything ready to take its place, the decision has thrown business and legal authorities into confusion. Now - as of last Friday - the European Commission has stated that a 'renewed and stronger' agreement with enhanced enforcement mechanisms is expected to be completed within three months.


Meanwhile in the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected a petition from privacy advocate Consumer Watchdog which said sites such as Google and Facebook should be forced to honor users' 'Do Not Track' (DNT) requests. DNT has had a bumpy ride - in mid-2012 the momentum seemed to be towards privacy, with the main browsers and top online destinations declaring their support for the principle, but a year later delays were frustrating privacy groups, and another 12 months on big companies began withdrawing their support, citing their own frustration at the failure of industry parties to agree standards and definitions. The FCC's recent Open Internet Order - which asserted its right to control the area by reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service - was seen by some as the harbinger of tighter controls over the companies, but the latest ruling quashes current hopes they will be forced to comply with users' DNT requests, and suggests the FCC will tread carefully.


The FCC is also seeking public comment over another privacy petition, this one put forward in September by Broadnet Teleservices, LLC. This asks the Commission to declare that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) - whose recent changes / clarifications in definition are seen as a threat to the future of telephone research in the US - does not apply to calls made 'by or on behalf of federal, state and local governments, when such calls are made for official purposes'. Broadnet argues that the rules as currently understood may leave citizens who exclusively use wireless phones effectively deprived of important opportunities to engage with the government. If accepted, the petition could ease the path for research organisations working on behalf of public sector clients, at least. Petitions seeking a more general redefinition of the rulings - specifically those relating to autodialler definition and calls to mobile phones - have already been filed and have received the backing of American MR bodies CASRO and the MRA, in August.


Lastly, one interesting solution to life after the new TCPA is the subject of an article on CNBC this week. Reconnect Research is the proud owner of a large number of 1-800, 7000 and other numbers similar to high usage numbers given out by leading firms for customer service etc.. If a consumer misdials and gets the research company's number, they're asked to do a survey, and a perhaps surprising number go through with it:

In a recent case study, Reconnect showed that 14.5 percent of people stayed on the phone long enough to complete an entire three-minute survey... Even with a small bank of numbers, you could receive 2.5 million misdials a month. With a completion rate that high, we're talking over 12,000 completed surveys per day'.

Turning on its head the phrase, 'Don't call us, we'll call you'... The item is here
www.cnbc.com/2015/11/09/call-a-wrong-number-you-might-be-asked-to-fill-out-a-survey.html


Thanks to www.law360.com and www.lexology.com for some of the above.