Articles

The insights industry’s public policy concerns entered March roaring like a lion, but they are not exactly leaving it like a lamb. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress touched on a few of them, including privacy, artificial intelligence (AI) and research subjects who receive incentives. Further this month, IA is engaging with legislation and regulation on data privacy, including potential harsh restrictions on data sharing with Chinese-controlled companies and restricti...

This month, the Insights Association focused on extensive artificial intelligence legislation at the state level, urgent developments in privacy compliance in California and Washington state, new bills on census issues (including one that would kill the ACS), the insights compliance concerns with sales taxes on SaaS and PaaS, and a couple of new telephone-related bills.

As we close out an intense summer for the insights industry, the Insights Association has been focused on a wide variety of policy issues, including: the launch of a new program for legally transferring European Union personal data to the U.S.; looming worries in complying with state comprehensive consumer data privacy laws that came into effect on July 1, and newly-passed state laws in Florida and Tennessee; the latest developments in compliance concerns and regulation of artificial intelligenc...

A coalition of lawful callers, including the insights industry, requested that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “exercise care to avoid preventing the transmission of legal calls in its effort to deter illegal robocalls” and “not create the same problem that it is trying to fight.”

As temperatures rose, so did the threats and opportunities for the insights industry in advocacy during May, ranging from three new comprehensive state privacy laws, advancing regulation of artificial intelligence, compliance concerns with state sales taxes, jousting over the Census Household Panel, restrictions on high-end incentives for research subjects, state legislation to ban non-competes, and a new Maryland law restricting most telephone calls for research purposes.

The U.S. Supreme Court has clarified the definition of an autodialer in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The case, in which the Insights Association had joined an amicus brief, potentially clears up decades of convoluted and conflicting rules and decisions from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and various courts that have tied legitimate actors in knots and fueled a deluge of class action litigation.

The Insights Association joined an amicus brief in a U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the definition of an autodialer in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The leading nonprofit trade association representing the marketing research and data analytics industry joined 10 other business groups in the filing, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Financial Services Association, and Business Roundtable.

A DC Circuit Court decision rejected much of the FCC's 2015 TCPA regulations and accepted a lot of the Insights Association's arguments in the case, in which we were intervenors.

Seeking to clarify the regulatory distinction between the intent to market and sell to individuals and the dissimilar intent to understand market needs, the Insights Association and AAPOR have filed a petition with the FCC to secure "greater clarity" that will be "critical to restoring a measure of sanity to TCPA litigation."

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should require voice service providers and call blocking service providers to check a white list of legitimate dialers before blocking a telephone number, according to comments from a leading research association.