June is proving to be a very active month for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in construing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, including what sorts of consumer interactions are sufficient to meet the requirements for consent to receive marketing or other messages. This post reports on an extraordinary warning letter issued to PayPal, criticizing a user-agreement based approach to collecting consent. Next week, we will report on a series of TCPA interpretative guidance which was adopted yesterday by a vote of 3 to 2.
On June 11, the FCC publicly released a warning letter sent to PayPal, Inc., by the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, stating that PayPal’s new user agreement “may violate” a federal law called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA. The TCPA requires a consumer’s consent before a business may make certain types of phone calls or send automated text messages. PayPal had released a modification of its existing user agreement (set to go into effect on July 1) that would authorize the company to make “autodialed or prerecorded calls and text messages” for a variety of purposes and at any telephone number PayPal associates with the customer.