Indian phone users you may not have to wonder who that “unknown” caller is for too long. The regulatory changes under consideration may help them avoid that pesky telemarketing and annoying call from a bank customer service executive trying to sell insurance.
In an effort to combat the spam call epidemic, India’s telecoms regulator is in the process of drafting a consultation paper supporting a mechanism that would allow phones to display the name of a caller even if the number is not saved on that person’s phone . This name will be derived from the Know Your Customer (KYC) data that telecom operators must collect from users before providing them with a SIM card.
“We are in the process of drafting a consultation paper,” Syed Tausif Abbas, an adviser at the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, told WIRED. “It will take maybe at least a month. After the paper is [ready]it will be made public for interested parties to comment on.’
India has seen a sharp rise in spam calls over the past year. According to a report by Swedish company Truecaller — which counts India as its biggest market — the country was the fourth-biggest spammer of the 20 it surveyed in 2021, up from ninth-biggest a year earlier. More than 200 million calls came from just one spammer between January and October 2021, according to the company. While the majority of calls were spam, over 1% were scams, where callers pretended to be from a bank or fintech startup and asked their customers for personal data. Over the past few years, Indians have had to deal with a host of scam calls that have caused some to lose money.
While Truecaller—and similar apps—can help identify a caller in some cases, the information may not be accurate because it’s crowd-sourced and not based on official data. And while India’s attempt to fight spam and scammers on a larger scale could help citizens better understand who is calling them, some policy experts say the effort will be futile and raise questions about privacy.
Pranesh Prakash, policy director of the Center for Internet and Society, says knowing who a number is associated with and being able to avoid spam or scam calls in some way would be helpful. “It might be good for people to know they’re talking to so-and-so, or the cell phone is registered to so-and-so, [especially] if they were the subject of fraud or something. So it can actually be useful from that point of view,” says Prakash. But he’s not completely sold on the idea.
