Tired of bulky SMSes, spams? TRAI plans rescue

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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is coming up with an AI and ML-powered plan to battle all those pesky commercial SMSs, spam calls and messages that ruin your day. The telecom watchdog has also requested a status update on the same within 30 days.

But, what comes under this category? Mostly, communications are sent across by a registered operator to their customers, for the purpose of giving information. This does not necessarily involve user consent. But there are some pesky commercial senders that bombard the user with promotional information, without the user’s consent or their registered preferences.

These messages, and the entities behind them are a major source of nuisance to the regular user. Such entities, called unregistered telemarketers, are not listed under the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018, but are registered with access providers and use 10-digit numbers to send spam. More often than not, these spam messages also have links for fraudulent payments or purchases, due to which customers might end up losing money.

The directives instruct that all such access providers must deploy an AI/ML enabled UCC detection system that is capable of undertaking a reputation-based analysis of the sender. Telcos will also be required to share and create a common database of spam callers with other carriers, via blockchain.

Thanks to the efforts of TRAI, calls from registered telemarketers have dropped, but those from unregistered ones continue, causing public inconvenience.

What will the system be capable of? TRAI had previously also mandated the implementation of a system that detects such spam. But, given the rapidly evolving methods deployed by these telemarketers, there has been little positive progress on that front.

The new rules mandate the usage of AI spam filters, along with creating a uniform consent seeking platform, or a DCA (digital consent acquisition) via which, all service providers and entities can approach and record customer’s consent for whether they can or not send promotional messages.