The Federal Trade Commission announced a broad, new initiative yesterday, launching a new website that can be used to make its Do Not Call registry more transparent and available.
The website, which can be accessed here, will be updated quarterly, and allows individuals to search different states and counties for the types of complaints and whether the caller was a robocall or live individual.
Data on the website is searchable back to October 2016.
For example, looking at data from the great state of New Jersey, a user of the new site would be able to determine that, there were 290,871 total complaints between June 2017 and June 2018, and that a dropped call or no message was the most popular complaint topic, compared with 220,806 complaints between June 2018 and June 2019. For both 12-month period, drilling down into the data, Bergen County, New Jersey had the most complaints, ahead of Monmouth County.
Users will also be able to chart the different types of complaint over time, seeing how different types of complaints are trending. The site also distinguishes between live callers and robocalls, so that data can be sorted and tracked over time, as well.
Before the FTC launched the website, this data was only available in a published report that was released once a year.