By Denis Carmel
TORONTO – It’s difficult for the head of regulatory agency to offer some interesting speech tidbits since what we want to hear, he cannot address because it is under review and so what he can talk about, we already know.
Just two weeks ago, chair of the CRTC Ian Scott gave a speech at the ISP Summit which was, in terms of news, a little thin and Tuesday he spoke at the Telecom Summit with little more information.
We were very interested in the consumer protection issues. Such as hearing about the number of Covid-19 scam-related complaints. The CRTC heard its first such complaint in January 2020 and by the end of September, nearly 10,100 more came through its Spam Reporting Centre.
“Since those earliest days of the pandemic, we have worked closely with our partners across government to reduce the harm caused to Canadians by Covid-themed scams. We have reviewed more than 10,000 potentially malicious Covid-related domains and flagged more than 1,200 for further review and action by our government partners. About a third of those sites—375 in total—were subsequently disrupted,” he said in his speech.
He also mentioned the two-month pilot project run by Bell where the company used Artificial Intelligence to block a massive number of fraudulent calls. After 61 days, the system blocked more than 200 million calls. Two hundred million!
“Bell has since filed an application to make this initiative a permanent solution—and we are assessing that application. If those early returns are any indication, this type of approach, which relies on using emerging technologies, could be an impressive new tool in Canada’s arsenal,” he added.
Our guess is the CRTC will approve it.
The results of the CRTC’s secret shopper project are in, he noted. The program was launched last year in response to concerns about misleading or aggressive sales practices that Canadians had expressed to the Commission, and to the government, over the past couple of years. About 20% of those reported interactions—one in five—were considered either aggressive or misleading.
“On one hand, that’s progress. On the other, it’s not nearly enough progress,” the chair said.
A deeper look at the data from the secret shopper report shows worrying trends when it comes to specific subsections of the population. For example, about 45% of shoppers with disabilities and who faced language barriers indicated they had not been accommodated enough to make informed decisions. “My message to you today is to work harder to gain the trust of all consumers—and those audiences in particular. It may be difficult to do so, but at the end of the day, serving these audiences better means you are serving all audiences better,” he added.
Another issue before the Regulator is the treatment of confidential customer information with the Covid Alert application and the role played by telecom service providers when it comes to protecting any data collected through the app. An application to that effect was filed with the Commission and: “Although not all of the issues raised in the PIAC application fall under the CRTC’s mandate, the application certainly raises some valid concerns for us,” he said.
A proceeding to study those aspects of the PIAC request that fell under the purview of the Telecommunications Act has been launched in October. These include the role of service providers in handling confidential customer information, what constitutes confidential customer information, and any measures that should apply to providers when they collect, use or disclose such information.
“We haven’t asked these kinds of questions about consumer privacy in some time, so this review is perhaps overdue.”
He announced the next version of the Communications Monitoring Report will be in one installment and will be issued in December. There will be a new approach: “First, in keeping with our digital-first philosophy, we will be releasing a streamlined version of the report. While there will be fewer charts and tables than you’re accustomed to seeing, this will enable a second important change – one that I think will be welcomed by our readership. Rather than staggering the release of data over several months, we will be publishing all the datasets at the same time in the Government of Canada’s Open Data portal,” he said.
As for the Commission’s new wireless policies (and potentially mandated MVNOs) and the Review & Vary filed by the incumbents over the August 2019 decision setting new wholesale fees for third party internet access providers, well, we’ll just have to continue to wait and see as Scott gave no hints as to when those might be announced.
