Tired of robocalls disrupting your day? You’re not by yourself, and the FCC is taking note. Recent press announcements reveal that curtailing illegal spam calls has emerged as its “top consumer protection priority,” with FCC chairman Brendan Carr vowing to “deliver significant robocall relief to consumers.”

Nonetheless, their approach could be overly broad and misdirected, possibly introducing new privacy concerns, abolishing “burner” phones, and imposing additional burdens on consumers. As Gizmodo’s Mike Pearl remarks, “the FCC’s remedy might be more detrimental than the issue.”

A proposed alteration, the “Know Your Customer” regulations, would mandate that businesses collect a government-issued ID, a physical address, and the full legal name of the customer, instead of merely their phone number, to commence phone interactions. This modification could aid in halting robocalls but would also substantially compromise consumer privacy. Civil liberties advocates Reclaim the Net assert: “The outcome would be an identity-verification system encompassing one of the last semi-anonymous communication methods accessible to everyday Americans.”

More alarmingly, the FCC’s suggested “red flags” that would amplify examination are broad enough to encompass the lawful activities of countless Americans. Suggested red flags include utilizing a virtual office, making payments with cryptocurrency, using a “suspicious” email account, or managing a phone number not linked to a residential address.

While these actions are probably indicative of robocall spam activity, they are also commonplace among law-abiding individuals, who frequently operate from virtual offices or utilize “burner” or pre-paid phones. Furthermore, individuals who depend on prepaid phones often do so because of the anonymity they afford — such as refugees escaping conflict zones or domestic abuse victims trying to remain undetected.

Ultimately, the FCC intends to shift the enforcement responsibility onto telecom providers, threatening them with penalties of up to $2,500 per call instead of targeting individual spam callers. While this method is simpler than pursuing every single robocall operator and clearly encourages companies to take compliance seriously, it also engenders a negative incentive where telecom providers must examine each customer and their actions at the cost of consumer privacy.

In the end, spam calls may represent the cost we incur for preserving some degree of privacy in the digital era.