Telecom users should know the legal name of anyone calling them, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recommended on Friday. The regulator recommended that Calling Name Presentation (CNAP), where phones display a caller’s identity based on their KYC registration data, be implemented on Indian telecom networks. The recommendation will now be considered by the Department of Telecommunications, which had sought TRAI’s inputs on the matter.
The idea was floated by TRAI in a consultation paper issued last year. The recommendations would allow subscribers to essentially see the name registered for every number that calls them, if they opt in to such a service. TRAI’s recommendations do not include a provision for telecom users to opt out of being identified when they call someone else, merely suggesting that the Department of Telecommunications exclude “witnesses/sensitive persons” pursuant to a court order.
“Telephone consumers, at various fora, have raised a concern that in absence of the calling party name presentation facility, they prefer not to attend calls from unknown telephone numbers, as most of such calls are unsolicited commercial communications [UCCs] from un-registered telemarketers,” TRAI said in the consultation paper leading up to this recommendation. “As a result, even genuine telephone calls go unanswered.”
Malicious purposes
The privacy tradeoffs that such a recommendation would entail was underscored by a few respondents to TRAI’s consultation. This proposal could harm Indian users’ informational privacy, the Internet Freedom Foundation said in a statement, warning that it would also “not give [users] control over whether or not their name is displayed to the recipient when they make a call. Moreover, it can potentially lead to the caller’s name being used for malicious purposes, such as identity theft or spamming.”
“From Data Privacy aspect … the name of the telecom consumer is his personal data and under the prevalent jurisprudence on the subject, we understand that there is a requirement of telecom consumer’s consent in sharing his name with a third party,” Reliance Jio said in its submission to TRAI. While the regulator noted privacy concerns in its summary of comments it received, it did not deal with these issues in detail in its recommendations, saying that it had chosen a mechanism that was least harmful to users’ personal information.
The regulator added a recommendation that DoT “formulate suitable guidelines for access service providers for this purpose, duly considering any possible misuse of the feature by unscrupulous persons.” One of the concerns that TRAI noted in its own recommendations was that persons from marginalised castes, or married women who have changed their legal name, may not want to display the name registered with their telecom connection. In these cases, TRAI suggested that DoT come up with a way for people to change the name that is displayed when they call someone but did not recommend a way to opt out of this altogether.
Truecaller, whose app is incredibly popular in India for identifying unknown callers, had earlier warned that just displaying a calling number’s registered name was not sufficient to combat spam. After Friday’s recommendations, the company put out a statement saying that CNAP would only drive more people to its app. “[W]e do not see that [CNAP] would be a competitive service comparable to the full range of services and functionality that Truecaller offers,” the company claimed, while otherwise welcoming TRAI’s suggestions.
