Portland, OR (PRWEB) June 10, 2015
Today IDICIA announced a Consumer Consent Reverification solution for companies challenged by recent circuit court decisions related to TCPA restrictions on telephone calls made without a consumer’s consent. These recent court decisions (Soppet v. Enhanced Recovery Company, LLC, 679 F.3d 637, 643 [7th Circuit, 2012] and Breslow v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., 755 F.3d 1265 [11th Circuit, 2014]) have held that companies are liable for un-consented calls or texts made to telephone numbers even when those phone numbers have been recycled and reassigned to new consumers.
IDICIA’s COO, Scott Rice, today clarified how the original consent can break down over time. “The specific problem is caused when a consumer consents to have a company communicate via phone call or SMS to a specific number, then changes their phone number and doesn’t notify the company to whom they had originally granted consent. The assumption has been that the consent was for communication to a particular phone number or to a particular intended recipient, but these two court decisions have clarified that the consent is associated to the consumer, not to the number.”
Rice stated that when these consented numbers are re-assigned to a new consumer, the companies continued to communicate with whom they believed to be the consenting party. “While it is clear to us that the companies continued to act in good faith in the belief that they still had consent, in both cases the courts rejected the notion that the consent of the intended subscriber was sufficient. In the Soppet case, the 7th Circuit stated 'consent to call a given number must come from its current subscriber.' With these decisions companies find themselves in the position of not knowing if they actually have consent or not unless they can verify that the original consenting party is still the subscriber assigned to the consented phone number."
To help companies establish if they still have consent, IDICIA announced a new configuration of their Telified™ brand called Telified CR that will provide what IDICIA refers to as “consent reverification”. Rice described this new capability: “Telified CR allows companies to automatically re-verify that the consenting consumer still owns the consented phone number.” Rice stated IDICIA’s solution uses its existing platform of telecom billing information access systems to determine the appropriate phone company for each phone number, then verifies with that phone company that the name and address they have on file matches the name and address of the consenting consumer. Rice continued, “Without any automation, the only choice left to companies to re-verify consent is to periodically manually dial the numbers and verify that the number is still assigned to the person from whom they had received consent. But that is costly, time-consumer and frankly, very annoying and a little suspicious for subscribers to have someone continually calling them up asking them to verify their name and address.” Rice estimates that this new solution can resolve this problem for over half of all US telephone subscribers.
For further information, corporate legal, privacy and compliance officers are encouraged to download a PDF from IDICIA’s website for additional information and guidelines.
About IDICIA
IDICIA is a wholly owned subsidiary of PacificEast Research Inc. IDICIA provides consumer identity and verification services via real-time web-services into the Call Center, Healthcare, Financial Service and Telecommunication markets. IDICIA and PacificEast Research Inc. are headquartered near Portland, Oregon. For more information about IDICIA call 1-844-4IDICIA or visit http://www.idicia.com.