Concern over unsolicited phone calls and messages mounts

KARACHI — The phone rings or beeps: it’s a call or a message from someone we don’t know offering something we don’t want.

This is, essentially, an invasion of privacy. Regrettably, there are no laws protecting Pakistanis from receiving such unsolicited messages and phone calls.

Companies selling our private and personal numbers are clearly legally suspect. Despite strong indications that customer data is sold to call centres for commercial purposes, no action has been taken by the relevant authorities.

The issue surfaced recently when Pakistan Tehreek-e-insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan used a recorded message to invite people in Karachi and Lahore to his party’s rallies. Global IT Vision, a call centre and software house, forwarded the message from the PTI chairman to people’s personal phones, both mobile and landline.

Regardless of whether or not the call was welcome, it went on to reach hundreds of thousands of people. The call fell silent, though, on the authorities concerned.

“Clearly, Imran Khan’s recorded message was an invasion of people’s privacy,” said Barrister Zahid Jamil, an expert on cyber and privacy laws who drafted the Electronic Transaction Ordinance.

Jamil said that although the calls were not technically illegal, they were unethical. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has fixed a limit on SMSS per minute, but this regulation is far from sufficient to protect the general public, some of whom received calls very early in the morning or late at night.

The company that relayed the calls says it is acting within the law as it has a licence from the government and the Pakistan Software Export Board. The company’s chief operating officer, Usman Zaheer, said that in countries such as the US privacy is protected through a ‘donot-call’ list — people who do not wish to be contacted with commercial messages.

Zaheer said there is no such list in Pakistan, but his company has made an internal do-not-call list. Zaheer also defended Imran Khan’s calls, saying that even in the US the do-not-call list does not apply to political campaigns.

Admitting there are no laws covering this particular issue, PTA’S director of public relations, Muhammad Younis, said it was a commercial activity and call centres are licensed to make such calls. He admitted that it is hard to draw a line between commercial and political messages, but stressed that PTA has warned telecom companies against selling customer data.

While there is a strong indication that customers’ numbers were taken from sources other than the directory for Imran’s calls, none of the telecom companies said they had played a part.

“There is absolutely no chance of Ufone being involved in facilitating the circulation of this call,” Ufone spokesman Moazam Ali Khan said. The company never gets involved in political activity, he added. Besides Ufone, Warid and Mobilink users also received Imran’s call, but their spokesmen also denied their companies’ involvement. — Internews