FTC Panel 1: Criminal Charges and the FDCPA?

As is the want of a lot of panel discussions, this one didn’t start out so much with a bang, or even a whimper. It was more of a dull lull. The opening remarks of the panel on skip-tracing and information gathering tended more towards the unofficial advertisement end of the conversational spectrum — “Well, our product does this, and it’s a good product, so if you need to do x, I recommend this product” — until Conor Kennedy maybe suggested that there should be criminal charges under the FDCPA.

Kennedy is a fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and styled himself as a consumer privacy advocate. For Kennedy, pretty much any attempt by a debt collector to contact a consumer represents about eleventy-one different violations of consumer privacy.

During a discussion about credit reporting, Kennedy jumped in to share a (seemingly unrelated and super complicated) story about data-theft involving a credit reporting agency, some iPods, and a lot of shady goings-on. What seemed to stick in Kennedy’s craw the most at the end of his story was the fact that the gentlemen behind the caper didn’t seem to suffer enough (or any) criminal charges. He seemed disappointed that the FDCPA didn’t allow for criminal charges; he seemed eager to turn that all around.

The heart of today’s FTC Debt Collection conference is consumer protection. The challenge is trying to come to some sort of understanding/agreement of what protection actually is. Clearly, in Kennedy’s example, consumers were harmed by nefarious wrong-doings. There are already laws to handle that. It seems tougher, though, to imagine consumer protection necessary because someone is embarrassed about an overheard voicemail message (there’s a lot of talk about home answering machines, and I keep checking to make sure it’s not 1992).

The Kennedys of the world see creating additional pieces of legislation as the way to go; the rest of the panel felt that maybe just enforcing the legislation currently on the books might be the better way.