December 30, 2020 marks the one year anniversary of President Donald Trump signing the Pallone-Thune TRACED Act into law. The law, whose name is an acronym for Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence, is the first major federal telemarketing legislation in more than a decade.
As part of its ongoing efforts to implement the TRACED Act, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved new safe harbors for phone companies that implement call blocking technologies.
According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, a “Safe Harbor” is “a provision granting protection from liability or penalty if certain conditions are met. A safe harbor provision may be included in statutes or regulations to give peace of mind to good-faith actors who might otherwise violate the law on technicalities beyond their reasonable control.”
In December 2018, the FCC announced a plan to create a reassigned number database. Callers would be able to scrub their number lists against this database in order to remove any numbers that have been reassigned to new users, thus decreasing the possibility of incurring Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) violations by calling these new users.
