Justice Pasayat calls for law to ban unsolicited communication
Bhubaneswar, Nov 26 (UNI) Supreme Court Judge Justice Arijit Pasayat today favoured for framing laws to ban all types of unsolicited communications in the country.
Unsolicited and unwanted communications were being thrust upon the individuals regardless of their personal convenience and inclination and infringing upon their privacy, Mr Justice Pasayat said while inaugurating a seminar ''Dispute settlements and protection of consumers rights in the telecom and broadcasting sectors'' organised by the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT).
The privacy and human rights issues surrounding the use of technology were being taken for granted and vulgarity, piracy and illegal carriage of content have become rampant, he remarked.
The service providers, Mr Justice Pasayat said, have started showing more concern to increase their revenues multifold but were showing lesser concern for consumer rights, transparency and respect for individual's privacy.
Even a year after the Supreme Court asked government to crackdown on these unsolicited telemarketing calls, such calls offering credit cards, car loans, holiday packages and insurance schemes continue to spring up on the phone users across the country day-in-day-out, no matter whether they are in a board meeting or attending a funeral, the Supreme court judge remarked.
He said the guideline issued by RBI to banks on this issue, have also neither been widely publicised nor any time frame appears to have been specified for their implementation.
Mr Justice Pasayat said though TRAI has directed the cellular operators to introduce special dialing codes to activate specific ring back tones to discourage telemarketing and sales promotion calls to subscribers on international roaming but the facility to bar spam needs to be extended to all subscribers.
He said world over the rules have been made to curb telemarketing calls somewhere or the other. For instance, in US, Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) together established the national do not call registry in 2003.
Telemarketing firms were prohibited from calling those subscribers who registered with the registry.
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