E-Paper
Digital consent project to protect customers against scam calls, SMSes underway: TRAI
The framework will replace unverifiable, offline consents to provide consumers increased control over commercial communications.
A pilot project towards building a secure digital consent framework is underway, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said on Tuesday, July 22.
The framework will replace unverifiable, offline consents to provide consumers increased control over commercial communications.
A Joint Committee of Regulators (JCOR) has intensified efforts to put a halt to any spam or fraud and the misuse of telecom infrastructure, the statement released by TRAI said.
The project, spearheaded by the TRAI and Reserve Bank of India (RBI), also includes major telecom service providers and banks like SBI, HDFC, PNB, ICICI, Axis Bank, Canara Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
“The new mechanism will enable the consumers to digitally register, review, and revoke consents through a simple, unified and tamper-proof interface,” the TRAI release said.
Four dedicated working groups have been constituted for overseeing the technical, operational and awareness-building parts of the project.
Before the meeting of the JCOR, the TRAI and RBI conducted a joint workshop on Monday on Digital Consent Acquisition (DCA).
“Various issues related to digital consent acquisition were deliberated and all the participant agreed to work together in a sustained manner to move forward.” the TRAI said.
At the meeting hosted by the TRAI in Delhi, the JCOR also discussed the fixing of timelines for moving to the 1600-number series for transactional and service calls in the banking, financial services, and insurance sectors, as per the statement.
Given the different scale of operations of these sectors, it was decided that the migration will be done in phases depending on the inputs provided by the regulators to the TRAI.
Representatives from the SEBI, IRDAl, RBI, PFRDA and IT Ministry, along with officials from the Department of Telecom (DoT), Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), convened at the TRAI headquarters for the meeting.
