Telcos to share data with each other to curb the menace of pesky messages

According to the latest directives issued by Trai, telecom companies have until July 31 to develop and deploy a mechanism to acquire consent from customers

According to a Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) directive, telecom operators will be required to share data among themselves to curb the menace of pesky and fraudulent messages, The Economic Times (ET) reports.

Since this will have to be done on a large data set, the scale of consent collection will also be huge. The process may need more time to be completed than Trai has allowed, the report said.

People aware of the development said that, earlier, Trai had asked telecom operators to move commercial messaging onto a blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. Digital consent acquisition was one of the foremost requirements of the regulator's original mandate.

The report quoted a senior industry professional as saying that Blockchain-based solutions need all stakeholders to participate and cooperate. As a part of this exercise, telcos share the collected consent to ensure that it is registered across all service providers, the expert said.

Previously, Trai had asked telcos to move all commercial messaging, including one-time passwords, promotional messages, and account balance updates, to the DLT platform.

According to the latest directives issued by Trai, telecom companies have until July 31 to develop and deploy a mechanism to acquire customer consent. Moreover, the telcos also need to provide a facility for customers to revoke their consent if they want to, the report added.

Talking about the challenges involved in the process, a telecom executive said that thousands of registered entities send commercial messages.

Additionally, millions of customers receive these messages. Getting consent from each one of these is a tricky and time-taking exercise, the executive said.