Requiring opt-in customer consent before a carrier shares information with outsiders doesn't violate carriers' First Amendment rights or the Administrative Procedure Act, ruled the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It rejected the NCTA's challenge to a 2007 FCC order on customer proprietary network information. "There is nothing" to the NCTA's argument that "the administrative record does not support the Commission's Order," the court said. Protecting CPNI is a "substantial government interest," the court said, rejecting the 10th Circuit's 1999 view in US West v. FCC. "We do not agree that the interest in protecting customer privacy is confined to preventing embarrassment as the Tenth Circuit thought," it said. "There is a good deal more to privacy than that. It is widely accepted that privacy deals with determining for oneself when, how and to whom personal information will be disclosed to others." nnActing FCC Chairman Michael Copps praised the decision. "Telephone carriers today handle vast amounts of their customers' personal information, and in light of documented abuses of consumers' privacy, the Commission appropriately required carriers to institute additional safeguards to protect customers' personal information," he said. In choosing opt-in over opt-out, the FCC carefully considered the differences, and the evidence supports the commission's decision, the court said. The commission didn't need evidence that a third party was improperly sharing CPNI that it had received from a carrier. "This argument, by focusing on what happens after a joint venturer or independent contractor receives the information, performs a sort of sleight of hand," the court said. "It diverts attention from the fact that the carrier's sharing of customer information with a joint venturer or an independent contractor without the customer's consent is itself an invasion of the customer's privacy."
展开▼
