Spam at bay, unless you say ‘okay’: TRAI’s new pilot to ensure no spam without consent

New Delhi: Spam calls are a perpetual pain in everyone’s life. Easing this pain out, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recently announced a pilot project that might just eradicate spam calls entirely, unless you have opted or validated for it. 

Before initiating a nation-wide roll out, TRAI has collaborated with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), along with some other selected banks, to launch a digital consent management system. Through this management structure in place, TRAI is aiming at making sure that companies really do have your permission before bombarding you with spam calls and messages. 

At the heart of this move is a growing concern. According to TRAI, many businesses claim to have consent to send messages or make commercial calls, “but a large number of complaints from consumers tell a very different story.” Often, consent is acquired in a somewhat questionable manner - through deception, misinformation or even without consent at all - adding to the growing pile-up of unwanted commercial communication. 

This consent is protected under the regulatory framework defined by the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018. According to it, an entity can make commercial communications to a consumer irrespective of his/her Do Not Disturb (DND) preferences provided the entity has taken explicit consent from the consumer.

To enable this new framework, companies will need to register consent digitally in a secured and interoperable digital consent registry. 

This way, when a business reaches out to a consumer, its consent can be easily and transparently verified, much like a digital permission slip. However, for the framework to work smoothly, the companies sending these messages need to be on board, which is where the pilot with the banks comes in.

In a notification released by the regulator, it said, “Given the sensitivity of banking transactions and cases of financial frauds through spam calls, the banking sector has been prioritized for the first phase of implementation.”

Running under a regulatory sandbox, the pilot will enable regulators to validate operational, technical and policy aspects before scaling up the framework across sectors.