Customer Data Safety? Enjoy the Ride

According to the new Data Protection Law 2022 being mooted, personal information which is in the public domain, can be used for marketing purposes without specific customer approval. There are of course, many ways your personal information could filter into the public domain. So, there is always a fig leaf available to marketers

- Ajai Kumar Dayal

A RECENT STORY doing the rounds, was that someone picked up a call and kept saying "Hello, hello" without getting any response. By the time he disconnected, his bank account was cleaned out. This seems really far-fetched to me, but it highlights a problem that we face every day; unsolicited calls.

What is particularly galling, is that some of the biggest culprits are the most respected organisations who would normally adhere to professional and ethical standards, including real estate companies, retail brands, banks, insurance companies and (yes!) the gatekeepers - the telecom companies themselves. According to a report from Truecaller in 2021 quoted in Wired, India was the fourth highest spammed country among the 20 that they surveyed and of this, one company made (hold your breath) 200 million calls between January and October 2021! Of the calls they tracked, one per cent were spam calls asking for personal details.

Truecaller crowd sources its data with people voluntarily reporting nuisance calls. But many avoid the hassle of logging a complaint, which means the problem is much bigger. According to Indian law, unsolicited calls are not prohibited. In a good initiative, the government has set up a National Customer Preference Registry (NCPR) where you are encouraged to register your own Do Not Disturb rules. But I don't know how many people know of this, or how effective it is. I tried a few times to register through the 1909 sms number, without success.