The act allows residential and business cell phone users as well as facsimile subscribers to voluntarily sign up with the no-call list kept and maintained by the attorney general's office and adds faxes to the list of unwanted solicitations included on that no call list.

The act creates the crime of knowingly obtaining, receiving, or selling telephone records without a customer's consent. However, the act shall not preclude official actions of law enforcement, lawful use of the records to provide service, use of records pursuant to the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990, or emergency use of records by the government to prevent death or serious injury to a person. The act lays out penalties for such a violation; the crime is a felony that is punishable by a fine or imprisonment. The penalty for such crime increases based on the number of telephone records obtained, received, or sold.

A telecommunications carrier or a customer is allowed to recover actual damages, illicit profits, and punitive damages from persons violating this act. There is a two-year statute of limitations on such civil actions.

Under the act, telecommunications carriers that maintain telephone records shall establish reasonable procedures to protect against fraudulent disclosure of such records; reasonable procedures shall mean complying with the Customer Proprietary Network Information in section 222 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended. The act does not create any new cause of action against telecommunications companies.

The act adds telephone records to the forms of identification that can be used to commit identity theft. The act defines a telephone record as "any proprietary or personally identifiable information retained by a telecommunications carrier about its wireless or wireline service customers.

The act provides a wireless subscriber the option of submitting a written request to their wireless telephone provider that would prohibit them from transmitting the subscriber's records via electronic mail or facsimile. In such a case, the provider shall only transmit those records through U.S. mail to the billing address of the subscriber or make such records available online through a password protected website.

The act is similar to SS/SCS/SB 613, 1030 & 899 (2006).

MEGAN WORD