A major hurdle has been legacy consents, which are paper-based permissions commercial entities such as banks, insurance companies, trading companies, real-estate companies and others took from consumers years ago. Access providers such as telecom operators have said it is practically impossible to check the veracity of these legacy consents.
New Delhi: The telecom regulator’s ongoing pilot project for the digital consent acquisition mechanism with the top telecom operators and 11 banks will be concluded at the end of January, according to a government official. The pilot project started in June in collaboration with the Reserve Bank of India in a bid to curb unsolicited commercial communications or spam.
The proposed mechanism, under the Trai’s Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations 2018 (TCCPR 2018) Rules, is aimed at moving away from unverifiable offline user consents taken by commercial entities to send them promotional messages, to a more transparent, digital system. As part of the pilot, select telecom users have already started receiving notifications to test the review and revocation of consent process.
“We will get a conclusion report on the pilot by the end of January. In the meantime, we expect they will also be ready with the nationwide rollout plan,” the official said, asking not to be named.
A major hurdle has been legacy consents, which are paper-based permissions commercial entities such as banks, insurance companies, trading companies, real-estate companies and others took from consumers years ago. Access providers such as telecom operators have said it is practically impossible to check the veracity of these legacy consents.
“The challenge was that even if we started registering fresh consents on the new platform, everybody said they already have legacy consent from customers, and to go back and take fresh consent from all those users will be logistically impossible,” the official said.
Instead of retaking fresh consent, Trai has allowed all legacy consents to be uploaded to the distributed ledger created by the government based on blockchain technology to create a tamper-proof record of consents.
“The banks will take responsibility that what they are uploading is correctly verified. Prior to this, there was no such verification done on these consents,” the official said.
If the pilot is successful, there will be a nation-wide rollout starting with banks, followed by other commercial entities. This stage will involve significant technical preparation, the official said.
“Telecom service providers will have to create substantial infrastructure, including server space, to manage hundreds of millions of consents. Banks have to reorient their internal processes. Some banks even do not have centralised records of consents. They will have to organise the reports centrally,” the official said.
To help with the implementation, Trai has created four working groups. In each group, there are representatives from the telcos, banks, along with banking and telecom associations, which meet every week to iron out issues being faced in the pilot stage.
