Mandatory caller ID display proposal dropped from Telecom Bill

In a relief for telecom operators – Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea — the government does not seem to be going ahead with its earlier proposal of compulsorily displaying calling party names — Calling Name Presentation — in mobile calls. The clause which mandated this in the draft Telecom Bill has been dropped in the final version, which was passed by the Parliament on Thursday.

Sources said that the same has been dropped as methods to seek consent from users, and display their names on the phone screen of the receiving party, would have led to serious privacy issues and rise in data breaches.

The development is positive for telcos as they had flagged challenges in implementation of the solution, which would have also increased the infrastructure cost for them. Further, implementation of the CNAP feature would also have required changes in call flow for them, resulting in longer call setup time,thereby impacting quality of services.

While the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has been working on the recommendations on the CNAP feature, the department of telecommunications (DoT) does not seem to be keen at the moment to implement it owing to privacy implications, sources in the know said.

The development is also positive for Truecaller in the sense that if this solution had come, the same would have affected its market share. However, owing to implementation of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, experts said Truecaller still would have to tweak its business model as currently it displays caller ID based on crowdsourcing of data.

As per the DPDP Act, the companies will have to take consent of users on using their information, and also will have to tell them how their personal data will be stored and used. The Act also empowers users to withdraw their consent and based on which the companies in use of the data will have to delete personal information.

In the earlier version of the Telecom Bill, the government in one of the clauses mentioned that “the identity of a person sending a message using telecommunication services shall be available to the user receiving such message, in such form as may be prescribed, unless specified otherwise by the Central Government”.

However, industry bodies such as Nasscom, Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) had flagged various privacy issues related to the feature. The consumer groups and industry organisations as part of the Trai’s consultation on the subject said there are various scenarios where users do not wish to have their identities placed on record on others’ devices, such as conversations by victims of domestic abuse, journalists, or whistle-blowers, or conversations bound by professional secrecy.

“Because of the various data privacy issues implementing CNAP would be difficult. However, the extent to which we implement the feature, should be based on user consent,” Mahipal Singh, vice president of regulatory affairs at Reliance Jio, had said in an open house session of Trai. “In addition to privacy, there can be issues like media stocking, risk of details being handed over to the other person who may misuse it,” Singh had said.

According to DeepStrat, a New Delhi-based think tank, storing a user’s personal information in any database and then disclosing it through a caller ID has privacy implications. Further, given the technical complexity of creating such a database, the feasibility of introducing this solution remains impractical, the think tank said in its comments on the Trai consultation paper.

Lately, Trai was also supposed to analyse the 2017 Supreme Court judgement on privacy in order to understand the issues with regard to implementation of caller ID feature.

In 2017, the Supreme Court declared privacy to be a fundamental right under Part III of the Constitution. The Court also ruled that the grounds for restricting the right to privacy have to meet the three-fold test of legality, necessity, and proportionality. Financial Express