![](\"https:\/\/media.wired.com\/photos\/62997fd58a06d69f5e44b38a\/master\/pass\/India-Robocalls-Security-GettyImages-1185467070.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Credit to Author: Varsha Bansal| Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2022 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Varsha Bansal<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n Indian phone users<\/span> may not have to wonder who that \u201cunknown\u201d caller is for too much longer. Regulatory changes being considered might help them avoid that pesky telemarketer and the annoying call from a bank customer care executive trying to sell insurance.<\/p>\n In an attempt to combat the plague of spam calls, India\u2019s telecom regulator is in the process of drafting a consultation paper supporting a mechanism that would allow phones to display the name of a caller even if the number is not saved on that person's phone. This name will be sourced from the Know Your Customer (KYC) data that telecom operators are required to collect from users before providing them with a SIM card.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are in the process of preparing a consultation paper,\u201d Syed Tausif Abbas, an advisor to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, tells WIRED. \u201cIt will take maybe one month at least. Once the paper is [ready], it will be in public domain for the comments of stakeholders.\u201d<\/p>\n India has witnessed a sharp rise in spam calls over the past year. According to a report by Swedish company Truecaller\u2014which counts India as its biggest market\u2014the country was the fourth-highest<\/a> spammed of the 20 it surveyed in 2021, climbing from ninth-highest the year before. Over 200 million calls came from just one spammer between January and October 2021, according to the company. Even though the majority of the calls were spam, over 1 percent of them were scams in which the callers pretended to be from a bank or a financial technology startup and asked customers for their personal details. Over the past few years, Indians have had to deal with a barrage of fraudulent calls that have caused some to lose money<\/a>.<\/p>\n While Truecaller\u2014and similar apps\u2014can help identify the caller\u2019s identity in some cases, the information may not be accurate, as it is crowdsourced rather than based on official data. And while India\u2019s attempt to fight spam and scam callers on a larger scale may help make citizens more aware of who\u2019s calling them, some policy experts say the effort will be futile and raises questions of privacy.<\/p>\n Pranesh Prakash, policy director of the Center for Internet and Society, says knowing who a number is connected to and being able to dodge spam or scam calls would in some ways be helpful. \u201cIt might be good for people to know they are talking to so and so, or the cell phone is registered under so and so\u2019s name, [especially] if they have been subject to fraud or something like that. So it might actually be useful from that perspective,\u201d says Prakash. But he\u2019s not entirely sold on the idea.<\/p>\n His biggest concern about this proposal is the sharing of KYC data with the government in the absence of a comprehensive data protection law in India. \u201cThere\u2019s an anemic provision of the IT [Information Technology] Act, which acts as a data protection provision, so what the government does with the data that you have entrusted to it isn\u2019t actually governed by a law,\u201d says Prakash. That said, the data privacy draft law is expected<\/a> to be discussed in the Indian Parliament soon, and if passed it could provide a layer of protection for user data.<\/p>\n But there are other concerns. Shalini Sivasubramanian, a senior researcher with the Centre for Policy Research, questions the overall utility of the plan: If the intention is just to let people know who is calling, it does not address the underlying problem of spam. \u201cWhat purpose is it serving if it just notifies the caller that this person is calling,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not fully solving the problems of spam calling.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n