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There have been too many Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) lawsuits in recent years; in 2014 alone, there were more than 2,000.

Many of the lawsuits center on auto-dialer technology, since unscrupulous businesses can use such technology to spam consumers with robocalls that are neither authorized nor wanted.

The trouble is that the recent proposal to curb such abuses might hinder legitimate automated calling campaigns, too. Pollsters, in particular, are worried.

FCC (News - Alert) Chairman Tom Wheeler announced on May 27 that a proposal had been circulated to other FCC commissioners that would address numerous issues around the TCPA. Among them is a rule that allows telephone carriers to use “do not disturb” technology to block calls. Specifics of the proposal are not known, since the FCC will not reveal proposal specifics until it has been voted on June 18. But word on the street is that pollsters might be affected.

Some pollsters assume the proposed guidelines would only apply to telemarketers, not legitimate polling organizations. This would be consistent with the Federal “Do Not Call” registry, which exempts pollsters.

Lobbyists in Washington are not so sure.

The rules could be “potentially devastating to the survey, opinion and marketing research profession,” Howard Fienberg recently told the Politico website, director of governmental affairs for the Marketing Research Association.

He added that the FCC and the chairman “are playing fast and loose with their terms, using unwanted calls, telemarketing calls, and robocalls interchangeably, and conflating illegal telemarketing scams with legitimate calls.”

Strict rules already exist for automated calling to cell phones. The FCC states that pollsters manually dial cell phone numbers to ensure consumers are not inundated with unwanted cell phone calls. This greatly adds to the expense of collecting survey data, since automated dialers help agents connect with live callers and bypass wrong numbers and answering machines.

If the new proposal takes effect, the situation could get even worse for pollsters.