WASHINGTON-The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association last week said it will soon ask the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to craft national wireless location privacy rules that call for consumer pre-consent.
The move comes amid controversy over what law governs location privacy today and questions about whether industry now genuinely embraces the kind of pro-consumer measure that it has opposed in the past. CTIA’s board of directors adopted a wireless location privacy policy at its Wireless IT conference in Santa Clara earlier this month.
The legal issue and the prospect of wireless Internet privacy regulations are expected to come up at a two-day workshop on wireless Internet privacy scheduled by the FTC for December.
Having determined that industry regulation of online privacy has failed miserably, the FTC now advocates-at a minimum-that consumers be asked in advance about third-party use of personal data gathered on the Internet.
As such, the wireless industry had little choice but to support an opt-in approach and try to shape any new regulations and laws governing wireless privacy.
Congress, regardless of the outcome of next month’s election, is likely to pursue Internet privacy legislation next year.
“The customer has the right to know information is being collected,” said CTIA President Thomas Wheeler.
But that has not been the wireless industry’s position in the past. Indeed, wireless firms previously argued they should not be subject to the same consumer information disclosure requirements that the FCC imposed on landline telephone companies before the rules were overturned by a federal appeals court in Denver last year.
The FCC has yet to rewrite CPNI rules.
According to CTIA’s interpretation of the law, it is legally permissible today for mobile-phone carriers to track the location of subscribers and advertise to them without prior consent under customer proprietary network information, or CPNI, rules.
Wheeler said location privacy restrictions in the wireless 911 law signed into law by President Clinton last year apply only to only 911 calls and do not cover commercial wireless location services. He said location-based mobile commerce applications are governed by the CPNI law, which was written into the 1996 telecommunications act.
“Arguably, that [non-emergency location] information falls under the scope of CPNI,” Wheeler said in a briefing with reporters last Monday.
That interpretation appears to be at odds with the 911 bill, which the FCC is in the midst of implementing in a rule-making proceeding.
“For purposes of subsection (c)(1), without the express prior authorization of the customer, a customer shall not be considered to have approved the use or disclosure of or access to call location information concerning the user of a commercial mobile service,” the 911 law states.
“It strikes me that our 911 implementation is one place to deal with their [CTIA] proposals, ” said James Schlichting, deputy chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
Several wireless lawyers contacted by RCR Wireless News said that while the legal questions may exist, the 911 bill appears to cover all uses of wireless location information-public safety and commercial alike.
Wireless bureau chief Thomas Sugrue said the prospect of initiating a new rulemaking is under consideration.
“One question we are looking at is whether we want to do something in this area in CPNI or separately. And part of that depends on the timing and priorities of the two bureaus,” Sugrue told reporters last Tuesday.
The CPNI rewrite is being handled by the FCC’s Common Carrier Bureau.
Washington reporter Heather Forsgren Weaver contributed to this story.
