The Federal Communications Commission wants to require telecommunications providers to collect vast amounts of personal information from every person who wants a phone number in the name of combatting scam and spam calls. This plan will fail to combat the deluge of unwanted calls people in the United States receive every day while giving untrustworthy companies a gold mine of information that would harm everyday consumers’ privacy, access to communications, and ability to speak freely.
The requirement to provide ID and an address would completely cut off the ability to have an anonymous phone line, which would mean many people in the most precarious situations imaginable—domestic violence and human trafficking survivors, unhoused people, and children without stable homes—would not be able to gain access to a crucial lifeline. EFF, along with ACLU, has submitted comments advising the FCC to abandon this proposal entirely.
Requiring phone providers to collect consumers’ information will not appreciably decrease or eliminate unwanted calls. The FCC itself confesses in its own rulemaking that “the most effective way to prevent unwanted calls from reaching American consumers is by ensuring they never enter the network.” The Federal Trade Commission has found that a significant proportion of unwanted robocalls originate from overseas—collecting the personal information of everyone who wants to make a phone call will not put a dent in fraudulent calls.
Mass data collection of individuals does not address unwanted calls, but it does make us all less safe online. The telecommunications industry has proven time and again that they’re poor stewards of personal information, having been at the center of several large-scale data breaches in recent years, including incidents affecting tens of millions of AT&T and Comcast customers, and the Salt Typhoon attacks on the nation’s CALEA wiretapping infrastructure.
Anonymity in calls provides people the safety they may require to organize themselves, speak freely, and seek services. Anonymous phone calls give people the courage to participate in politics, reach out to a suicide or sexual-assault hotline, an addiction-recovery sponsor, seek medical care, or seek escape from a violent and coercive situation. Not everyone has the government-issued identification or stable home address the FCC’s proposal would require, which would shut many vulnerable people out of phone service entirely.
The FCC’s proposal will not decrease the amount of unwanted calls. All it will do is set up a data collection regime that harms everyday, law-abiding Americans, strips away the right to anonymous speech in calls, and disconnects those already at the margins. EFF recommends the FCC discard this proposal in its entirety.
This article was originally published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Republished under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Read the original article: https://eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/fccs-spam-call-proposal-just-data-collection-scheme.
