Mississippi PSC Charges Telemarketers for Violations of Do Not Call Law

In a news release the Mississippi PSC announced that it has charged multiple telemarketers with violations of the Mississippi No-Call law.  The PSC’s investigation found that 8 companies made 775 illegal calls to Mississippians.  Should these entities be found to have violated the No-Call law, they are subject to a $5,000 per call fine; totaling $3,875,000.

“I’ve asked our staff to leave no stone unturned.  We have doubled our efforts to stop these predators.  These companies will get the message that we mean business.  We will stop these predatory calls on Mississippians,” said Commissioner Presley.

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The Regulatory Mix Today: Mississippi PSC Charges Telemarketers for Violations of Do Not Call Law, NIST Publishes Preliminary Draft of Privacy Framework, FCC Deactivates DIRS Following Hurricane Dorian and Releases Communications Status Report

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NIST Publishes Preliminary Draft of Privacy Framework

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published a preliminary draft titled A Tool for Improving Privacy through Enterprise Risk Management (Privacy Framework) indented to improve privacy through enterprise risk management.  The Privacy Framework is intended to help organizations build better privacy foundations by bringing privacy risk into parity with their broader enterprise risk portfolio.

NIST working in collaboration with private and public stakeholders, has developed the voluntary Privacy Framework.  The Privacy Framework is intended to drive better privacy engineering and help Organizations protect individuals’ privacy by:

• Building customer trust by supporting ethical decision-making in product and service design or deployment that optimizes beneficial uses of data while minimizing adverse consequences for individuals’ privacy and society as a whole;
• Fulfilling current compliance obligations, as well as future-proofing products and services to meet these obligations in a changing technological and policy environment; and
• Facilitating communication about privacy practices with customers, assessors, and regulators.

FCC Deactivates DIRS Following Hurricane Dorian and Releases Communications Status Report

The FCC announced it has deactivated its Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS).  Communications providers do not need to provide any additional reporting in DIRS with respect to Hurricane Dorian.  The FCC will, however, continue to monitor the status of communications services and work with providers and government partners in these areas as needed to support remaining restoration efforts.

The FCC also released its Hurricane Dorian Communications Status Report.   The report incorporates network outage data submitted by communications providers to the FCC’s DIRS.  DIRS is was most recently activated for counties in North Carolina and South Carolina.  On September 5 and 6, DIRS was deactivated in Florida and Georgia, respectively.

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The Regulatory Mix, Inteserra’s blog of telecom related regulatory activities, is a snapshot of PUC, FCC, legislative, and occasionally court issues that our regulatory monitoring team uncovers each day. Depending on their significance, some items may be the subject of an Inteserra Briefing.