Recap of FCC’s $34.6M settlement with CaptionCall/Sorenson on privacy concerns
In July, the FCC announced it reached a $34.6 million settlement with CaptionCall and its parent company, Sorenson Communications, to resolve FCC’s investigation on “unlawful retention of call content beyond the duration of a call and submission of inaccurate information to the Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) Fund Administrator.”
I will recap what is in the settlement. Full disclosure - Sorenson is one of the sponsors of “The Daily Moth.”
CaptionCall is a service that allows those with hearing loss to make voice calls by providing a phone-like device that has a screen on it that displays captions. They can speak with their voices and hear the other party’s voice with the assistance of captions, which is provided by a communication assistant (CA) or by automatic speech recognition software (ASR). This service is funded by the FCC’s TRS fund, which funds various services such as video relay services (VRS), TTY relay service, or IP Relay.
Some history: in December 2021, there was a $40.5 million settlement between FCC and CaptionCall/Sorenson to resolve violations of TRS rules that included giving incentives to hearing health professionals if they got a customer to use their services. This is illegal. A part of the settlement required CaptionCall to issue regular reports to the FCC about how it was complying with TRS rules and also submit reports if there were new issues with noncompliance.
Now, the FCC said from these reports of compliance/noncompliance, they saw that there was “improper retention of call content beyond the duration of the call.” This was a concern. Another issue was that CaptionCall received compensation from the TRS Fund for minutes that were ineligible for compensation.
The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau started an investigation. The settlement document said CaptionCall was cooperative and made its personnel available for interviews. Some FCC staff visited CaptionCall’s facilities in Salt Lake City, Utah. CaptionCall told the FCC that it does not believe that the retained call content was accessed, breached, or disclosed in any way. CaptionCall said there were software errors.
FCC said to resolve this investigation, they entered into this consent decree (settlement). CaptionCall will have to get an independent examiner to assess all of its processes of submitting requests for reimbursement from the TRS Fund, set a rigorous process of managing incidents of noncompliance, designate a “Privacy Officer” to manage the company’s privacy and data protection program, and establish a process to limit the retention of user data to only what is reasonably necessary.
The FCC said Sorenson/CaptionCall will have to pay a $5 million civil penalty, reimburse $12 million to the TRS Fund, relinquish over $13.6 million in reimbursement claims, and invest $4 million in privacy and data protection enhancements for TRS users.
The FCC said they would not set a hearing to question whether CaptionCall should still be qualified to hold or obtain any FCC license or authorization.
The FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement regarding the settlement that they are “deeply committed to ensuring that consumers with disabilities have the same assurances of privacy as any other consumer.”
That’s the recap of the settlement.
The settlement frequently emphasized the importance of TRS privacy and data protection enhancements, but there were no specific information on what the data was and what was used with it. I reached out to the FCC to ask for detailed information but they were not able to provide any new information.
I reached out to Sorenson for comments and they said they won’t be making any further comments because the Consent Decree (settlement) is available publicly.
Clearly, the FCC felt very concerned about whatever data was being collected from CaptionCall calls and took action that resulted into this multi-million dollar settlement, the second in less than four years.
Links to the settlement and news articles are in the transcript.
2024 Settlement: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-641A1.pdf
2021 Settlement: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-21-1488A1.pdf
https://www.law360.com/articles/1856417/fcc-settles-call-caption-privacy-probe-for-34-6m
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