‘TRAI’ed and failed miserably

New Delhi: You signed for a noble cause. You signed for net neutrality. You even provided your personal details, including your email ID. Get ready to receive spams as your id is now public.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has made all the responses to its paper on the need to regulate OTTs like WhatsApp, etc, available for the public.

TRAI on March 27 had put up a consultation paper on its website asking users to give their views on net neutrality in India. It reportedly received over 10 lakh responses to its paper and has now put out all the responses, including email ids on its website.

By putting out your personal details online, it has now created a treasure trove for spammers alongside putting your confidential data at risk.

In an age where email ids are linked to social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and even with banks, exposing so many ids, carries many consequences.

Spammers and phishers now have access to a million valid email ids and they can send fraudulent mails to many unsuspecting users. In a country, where digital literacy is still in its infancy period, such carelessness will only increase cyber-crime.

This move has led to widespread criticism of TRAI, slamming the organisation for making it easy for spammers to get a huge database of email IDs in one go.

“TRAI has published the list with emails addresses of everyone. This is a jackpot for spammers http://trai.gov.in/Comments/Comments-List003.pdf … #NetNeutrality,” tweeted one Roshan Singh.

Sundeep Palavalli tweeted: “Oh Crap: Thanks to TRAI, spammers and database sellers now have email ids of a cohort of 1M+ Indians who (largely) support #NetNeutrality.”

Net neutrality implies that all websites and services should be treated equal and there should be no discrimination in terms of speed and cost of access. This means that a telecom company can’t block a certain website (because of commercial or other interests) or promote one service over the other.

It also means that an internet provider or telecom company cannot throttle speeds for one service or charge extra. Indian mobile operators say that they have made big infrastructure investments in creating networks and OTT players are getting a free run.

The consultation paper on net neutrality asked the public a total of 20 questions about the topic and whether OTT services like WhatsApp and Skype should pay extra for data consumed by users.