War on spam: Govt, telecom industry need to adopt a zero-tolerance approach

Without wasting any more time, the DPDP Act needs to be acted upon with the goal of protecting users' data and thereby minimising fraud

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), the sector regulator, and the telecom industry have initiated action to curb spam calls and messages on mobile phones, but these are early days to gauge the impact of such steps. While a start has been made by Trai through mandatory whitelisting or registering uniform resource locators (URLs) and over-the-top (OTT) links sent through commercial text messages to reduce potential fraud, the need of the hour is a 360-degree war on spam.

Spam has many sides to it. By their very nature, spam calls and messages are unsolicited and a