The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has directed the service providers to develop a digital platform in two months to seek, maintain, and revoke customers’ consent for promotional calls and messages. The decision has been taken by the regulatory body to curb the menace of pesky calls and SMS.
During the first phase, only the subscribers will be able to initiate the process to register their consent to receiving promotional calls and SMS. Later, the business entities will be able to reach out to customers to seek their consent to receive promotional messages, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in a statement on Saturday.
“TRAI has now issued a direction to all the access providers to develop and deploy the Digital Consent Acquisition (DCA) facility for creating a unified platform and process to register customers’ consent digitally across all service providers and principal entities,” TRAI said.
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Presently, there is no unified system to show the customers consent to getting the promotional messages.
“Considering the volume of work involved, TRAI has allocated two months time to develop such facilities by all Access Providers and thereafter implement it in a phased manner. This direction has been issued by TRAI under its Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018,” TRAI said.
The absence of a unified digital platform makes it impossible for telecom operators to check the veracity of content.
“The DCA process shall have the facility to seek, maintain and revoke the consent of customers, as per the processes envisaged under TCCCP Regulation 2018. The consent data collected will be shared on the Digital Ledger Platform (DLT) for scrubbing by all access providers,” TRAI said.
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Providers like Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea have been further directed to use a common short code starting with 127 for sending consent-seeking messages.
“The purpose, the scope of the consent, and the principal entity or brand name shall be mentioned clearly in the consent-seeking message sent through the short code,” the statement said.
(With input from agencies)
