grayestofghosts | Reply All #135 Robocall: Bang Bang

I'm not a religious listener of long-running podcasts but one of my favorites is Reply All, which is "about the internet" and touches on a lot of security topics. I just got finished listening to the most recent one and it's a bit of a doozy if you've ever owned a cell phone. I bet you have a cell phone. You may even be reading this on a cell phone, right now!

(A link to the episode, because the embedded media player is not working right now. Hopefully it will be soon.)

There's a lot to unpack about what is being done with your data without your permission and what is still being done. Much of this is still very "wild west" and seems like forward-thinking regulation has not caught up, but some of it isn't, and previous protections are actually being chipped away. If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing (and you really should), I'm going to go ahead and post possibly the most damning part of the transcript here:

MARGOT: So we became involved in the issue in 2014. I think as consumers we've all been aware of robocalls for many years before that. And we noticed that there were really no consumer–really active consumer advocates protecting consumers before the FCC. So we stepped in to try to fill that gap.

ALEX: So right about that time the Obama FCC was trying to reduce the amount of robocalls that were being made. And so in 2015, they wrote an order, which cracked down on autodialers.

[...]

ALEX: And so, for a while, it seemed like this was actually having like a positive effect. Like, the number of calls went down. But, the FCC's order didn't last very long.

MARGOT: In March of 2018, the D.C. Circuit Court issued an opinion that undermined the 2015 order of the FCC that significantly protected consumers.

[...]

MARGOT: So that decision sent the issue back to a perceived consumer unfriendly FCC and the industry said, it looks like, "Wow! Now we can make all the robocalls we want."

Why was the FCC suddenly unfriendly to consumers in 2018?

Elections have consequences.