As much as we worry about TCPA restrictions (and class action lawsuits), an increasingly thorny impediment to research via telephone is call blocking and labeling. We are working with a broad coalition of stakeholders to overcome the challenge, and we need your input on the draft industry best practices that would apply to the whole ecosystem.
The problems facing legitimate calling entities, like marketing researchers, include: (1) having calls blocked automatically, or even sometimes by explicit choice of the intended call recipient; (2) calls being labeled (either by a voice service provider themselves, or by a labeling app or service) as “junk,” “spam,” “marketing,” and the like; and (3) never receiving notification that a call has been blocked or mis-labeled (including some apps and services delivering a busy signal or constant ring back to a calling entity when a call has in fact been blocked.)
The Insights Association has been pushing in comments and meetings for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to require voice service providers and call blocking providers to whitelist legitimate callers and institute a reasonable resolution process for callers who are unfairly blocked. The FCC response is coming slowly, including on call authentication and caller ID, and it is not clear that the agency will act on our request anytime soon.
That makes the work of the Communication Protection Coalition, and your specific input, all the more important.
Voice service providers and blocking and labeling providers share a common interest with us in mitigating these problems, especially with labeling. Inaccurate labels or automatic blocking may result in some subscribers missing important calls. Once that happens, the value of labeling and blocking diminishes to the consumer. Therefore, errors in the ecosystem impact everyone negatively.
The mission of the Communication Protection Coalition, launched by PACE, is to mitigate errors that occur when wanted and legal calls are erroneously blocked or labeled, aiming to let calling entities: know when their calls are being blocked; check the status of their calls and their outgoing numbers; and request changes to correct any mistakes. The coalition includes legitimate callers (like us), voice service providers, the analytics companies that provide or fuel call blocking and labeling, and consumer groups. Representatives from government agencies also attend the coalition's meetings.
We need feedback from knowledgeable Insights Association members about the latest best practice documents from the coalition for how private industry should handle call blocking and call labeling:
- The overall draft: "Report on Best Practices for Mitigating Adverse Impacts of Robocall Processing on Legal Communications"
- The specific new draft of the section about vetting and registering call originators.
Government agency comment
During the PACE compliance summit in September, an attendee asked Lois Greisman, associate director of division of marketing practices at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), why telecommunications carriers couldn't just block spam as easily as Gmail does. Illustrating the complexities involved, Greisman said that technology doesn’t lend itself to that kind of AI-driven filtering. "Technology solved email spam, and junkboxes can be reviewed in case it fails," but current technology can’t tell you the content of a phone call, and consumers can’t go in and evaluate blocked calls’ content (in most cases) if they suspect they’re missing something due to blocking.
Also at the PACE summit, Mark Stone, deputy bureau chief for the FCC’s consumer and governmental affairs bureau, was asked what the agency would do about mobile apps that presumptively block most calls, since they are not necessarily directly under FCC jurisdiction (unlike voice service providers). He pointed out that the agency is concerned most about blocking by voice service providers, since it tends to not be opt in, and if broadly deployed, it is usually done at the network level and just happens, with no concern about consumer decisions. Apps, Stone said, are different, and the FCC has taken a "different standard" because the agency presumes "that a consumer has opted into the apps." The FCC wants consumers to be aware of the shortcomings and problems in the apps, but is not necessarily ready to step in and regulate such tools. "What you’re describing is a problem, but we’ve not taken position."
Background issues
Spoofed caller ID is a big driver for all parts of the telephone ecosystem to seek better blocking and labeling. Consumers (including me) suffer from scam calls utilizing spoofed caller identification.
Legitimate calling entities have been increasingly using local number presence (adopting numbers local to the area code to which you are calling), which can be valuable and improve answer rates, but caller ID spoofing from the bad guys is also on the rise. I can personally attest to that spoofing, since I receive scam calls from local area codes multiple times a day on my cell phone.
There are a variety of caller ID solutions, but they can also be spoofed.
Calling entities can also rotate out numbers as often as once a month or once a week just to keep dodging the blocking or labeling of their calls, but that might end up being expensive and time-consuming, AND the bad actors are doing the same thing at a much faster rate. Moreover, if a consumer affirmatively blocks calls from a number you have utilized, and you are rotating numbers, that consumer thinks they’ve blocked YOU, and then gets significantly aggravated when you call them from a new number. That could lead to a class action lawsuit for telephone harassment, at minimum.
There are ways for a calling entity to register with some voice service providers and blocking and labeling providers to help get their correct caller identification transmitted and possibly prevent the automatic blocking of their calls. However, there are a ton of different providers, so it is hard to know who to go to and who will actually respond. There are also limitations on the provider side for how many numbers can be registered and each registration process is unique. Some are free, others are paid, or tiered with the goal of incenting a calling entity's subscription. Also, the labeling options and details vary dramatically (and are not transmitted uniformly across the telecommunications system). Realistically, the current ecosystem requires a telephone research company to try to prove their identity over and over again., and potentially give significant private information about their own business practices to providers -- your call strategies, including who you call, how often and from where, are part of your competitive advantage.
Details from the most recent meeting of the Communication Protection Coalition
The most recent meeting of the Communication Protection Coalition, at the end of September, focused mostly on the high-level aspects of vetting entities that make calls, and a new draft of the vetting section of the coalition’s draft best practices.
Rebekah Johnson, CEO of Numeracle and leader of the coalition, discussed the concept of a “trusted call originator” to help prevent false positives in blocking and labeling. “When you’re running an algorithm without a baseline of truth, you might get it wrong, even with the best algorithm.” The idea is to “eliminate false positives by allowing the true positives to be known.“ While bad actors can try to become trusted, but can easily be sent running if the entity doing vetting demands contact information and other basic details.
She proposed to use the term “know your customer” instead of “vetting.” The vetting service would be provided by Industry associations, consultants, law firms, independent service providers, and others. An entity like ACA International, for example, would say: “we will vet our members as having been properly licensed as debt collectors.” Another entity may just check that a company isn’t under criminal investigation, while yet another may take all information given to them at face value. The only important question will be if a voice service or blocking/labeling provider finds the information offered by a vetting entity sufficient for their customers.
This vision would likely (or hopefully) result in certain kinds of associations vetting certain kinds of businesses or organizations, such as all the elementary schools being vetted by the elementary school association, and all the telephone research companies being vetted by a research association like the Insights Association. A specialty group is better situated to vet entities within that specialty than a general group.
One participant suggested approaching the vetting like the treatment of kosher food in the Jewish community: symbols provided by different vetting entities, with some entities trusted more than others by certain people.
Another person emphasized that tiers need to exist. Anyone that wants to start a mass calling campaign can go through low-cost vetting for access, so that a self-regulatory organization (SRO) doesn’t become a barrier to marketplace entry. However, the higher level of vetting from a SRO makes the resulting trust more valuable. A potential tier might include even simple self-certification – something done on the record, but with no guarantee from a third party, for which dialers would need to know that they’re more likely to run into trouble.
A representative from Transaction Network Services (TNS) replied that any extra information helps the call analytics providers that fuel call blocking and labeling to make better decisions.
Under the “Know Your Customer” model, an entity acquiring and servicing customers would:
- Determine the identity of its customers
- Determine customers’ potential risks
- Determine its customers’ risk associated with communication compliance
- Determine the normal and expected transactions of its customers
- Monitor account activity for transactions that are inconsistent with those normal and expected transactions
- Report any transactions of its customers that are determined to be suspicious
By requiring voice service providers, analytics engines, and solution/service providers to determine the identity of their customers, as well as to obtain knowledge regarding the legitimate activities of their customers, the “Know Your Customer” model would conceivably reduce the likelihood that carriers will become unwitting participants in illicit activities conducted or attempted by their customers.
As an example, in a lot of foreign countries, it is impossible to acquire a phone number without identifying yourself (including scans of recent utility bills and a passport), which raises the bar for satisfying the “who the heck are you” question.
A telecommunications provider at the coalition meeting said he would love for third parties to take on the “vetting burden,” since big carriers probably don’t want to have such an extensive “know your customer” campaign. He also emphasized that this king of monitoring should be done at the level of an originating carrier, not an analytics company – a carrier should monitor if a calling entity is using numbers they’re not supposed to use.
Asked about how this would impact local presence dialing, a representative from Neustar noted that a company would just provide all of the numbers from which they are dialing.
As an example of what could be done by a vetting entity to determine a “trusted customer,” the entity could ask for details to determine the customer’s identity (executive team, website, evidence of company formation, DUNS number, and EIN), determine the customer’s potential risks (through a compliance and risk system check), and determine its customers’ risk associated with communication compliance (compliance infrastructure, TCPA/DNC/state violation records, 3rd-party compliance/risk audit).
Karl Koster, chief IP counsel for Noble Systems, explained that data on the name of a caller will be more important in the future. Value-added services will arise to ensure that the name matches the number, he said. However, a representative from First Orion pointed out that caller ID with a name is completely different in the wireless marketplace from the landline marketplace. “Less than 10% of wireless subscribers see a name displayed when they get a call from a number that is not in their address book,” he observed. Since telecommunications carriers aren’t paying to access that name data, it does not get served. A Neustar representative further explained that if an originator “pushes the name out” in a call, and the network over which is gets carried is not VOIP the whole way, the name information usually gets dropped along the route.
A further debate occurred over some of the call blocking and labeling apps, especially NoMoRobo. Koster pointed out that the founder of the app has said his clients like to “over-block” calls, “so he’ll label just about anything a robocall.” Representatives from TNS replied that free-standing apps like NoMoRobo differ from providers like TNS that “are embedded with carriers.” Koster replied that some voice service providers have unfortunately embraced NoMoRobo because it is a free service. Johnson said that she’d prefer not to share information with NoMoRobo about some of her clients since she doesn’t trust what the company might do with the information. “He has publicly said he wants to block all debt collection calls,” for example, so she doesn’t see a reason to help him in that effort. Finally, the Neustar representative let the group know that his company is working on a pilot program of a whitelist that NoMoRobo could adapt on its platform.
REMINDER: Please review the CPC documents and send feedback to me as soon as possible.