Popularity Dialer unpopular with FCC
p2pnet news | Freedom:- You get a phone-call and, “Have to Rush!” – you say. “I’m a White House surgeon and I’ve just been called in for an emergency brain operation on George W. Bush.”
For at least one very obvious reason, that particular call could never happen. But the point is: you received a call at just the right moment in time.
And it might well have come from Jenny Chowdhury and Cory Forsyth’s PopularityDialer.
“Maybe you wanted to look extra important or popular on that hot date,” says the site. “Or maybe you just needed an excuse to escape from an unpleasant meeting.
“With ‘The Popularity Dialer’, you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that’s one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.”
An incredibly valuable service, right?
But the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doesn’t like it. So it served Post Jenny and Cory with a citation claiming they’d violated section “227(b)(1)(A)” of the Communications of 1934 and section “64.1200(a)(1)” of the Commission’s rules.
That was in September and the duo took the site offline.
But they’re back and in a new post they say:
The citation arose when a senior attorney for the FCC received an unrequested popularitydialer call on her cell phone and then filed a complaint. The main issue at hand is that people in the US pay for their incoming cell minutes so if they receive calls they don’t request, they still have to pay for them. We’ve talked to a few lawyers who said the real issue is finding out what the FCC considers “express consent” regarding agreeing to incoming cell phones calls from a website.
Interestingly, there isn’t much a precedent in this context because there are relatively few projects/companies that use web-to-phone as their method of execution. We do not verify phone numbers on our site before we make the call, but neither do the other venues that have similar services. When we initially contacted the FCC to see if we could work things out they sent the following:
“Mr. Forsyth,
I don’t see how a website falls within the jurisdiction of the FCC or how it would cause TCPA violations. We would not give any advice on how to legally continue the operation of your business. That would have to come from your own attorney. “
Apparently, the FCC has no idea why our website should have resulted in the citation they handed us.
Also a weird twist, the phone call upon which the citation was based was requested from an FAA (Federal Aviation Administation) IP address. Thus, the call was both elected and received by employees of goverment agencies. It seems a little strange.
Why the FCC doesn’t have better things to do with its time than shut down a student-founded project is beyond our understanding. In the meantime, standby and keep your fingers crossed.
The New York Times‘ David Pogue picked the story up and among other things wrote:
The whole thing is absurd on so many levels.
PopularityDialer doesn’t advertise or solicit anything.
PopularityDialer has always offered a place to list your number if you don’t want to receive its calls.
Plenty of other Web sites offer services that call you at a specified time. Most of them are wake-up services, like iPing.com, TelePixie.com, Wakeupland.com, Snoozester.com, and so on. All of them offer exactly the same risk of abuse as PopularityDialer. You could use any of them to set up a wake-up call to an F.C.C. lawyer, too. PopularityDialer just happened to be the unlucky victim of an anonymous jerk.
It gets weirder. When Ms. Chowdhury and Mr. Forsyth contacted the F.C.C. to get an explanation for the citation, the F.C.C. minion who responded was equally baffled. “I don’t see how a Web site falls within the jurisdiction of the F.C.C. or how it would cause T.C.P.A. violations,” went the reply. “We would not give any advice on how to legally continue the operation of your business. That would have to come from your own attorney.”
So let me get this straight: The same F.C.C. that sent the citation has no idea why it sent the citation?
Meanwhile, “We delivered our appeal to the FCC weeks ago,” say Jenny and Cory, adding:
“Hopefully, we’ll get some news soon.”
Also See:
New York Times – PopularityDialer Goes Offline, November 29, 2007
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December 1st, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Just somebody getting mad and misusing their power.