The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday said third-party applications such as Truecaller and Bharat Caller ID & Anti-spam, which are used by mobile phone users for identifying the name of the caller are not reliable.
According to Trai, such native and third-party apps do not fully meet the requirement of calling party name identification because they provide name identification services based on crowd-sourced data, which may not be reliable, in many instances.
The comments from the telecom regulator come at a time when the government, through the draft telecom bill, is targeting to bring regulations around mandatory identification of caller name to prevent fraud and spam calls.
In this regard, Trai has released a consultation paper seeking views on the need to introduce the Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) supplementary service in the telecommunication networks.
The CNAP is the supplementary service which enables a user to receive the calling name information of the calling party. This supplementary service provides the ability to indicate the name information of the calling party to the called party at call set-up time for all incoming calls.
As part of the regulations, only the mobile/landline numbers are being displayed as Calling Line Identification (CLI) during incoming calls and there is no mandate in the license for providing CNAP services.
The consultation process comes after various users have raised their concern in respect of robocalls, spam calls, and fraudulent calls to financially dupe them. As part of the consultation process, the telecom regulator seeks comments on issues such as mandatory activation of CNAP service in mobile phones, method for acquiring consent from users for CNAP service, permission of outgoing calls through toll-free numbers, rules regarding ‘preferred names’ for bulk users and toll-free numbers, among other things. The stakeholders can send their comments by December 27.
