There is an urgent  need to take effective measures to tackle harassing phone calls and junk messages. Photo: People’s Daily

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The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently issued the Work Plan on Combating Harassing Phone Calls. The plan calls for strengthening the regulation of communications channels and improving the development of prevention methods, thus curbing the spread of harassing phone calls. It is urgent for all relevant parties to take effective measures and make a collective effort to tackle harassing phone calls and junk messages.

Constant phone harassment needs to be fixed. The Ministry and 13 other departments started an 18-month-long mission to crack down on phone harassment. The new work plan calls for a comprehensive regulation of call center businesses by emphasizing that commercial advertising calls must be made with the users’ agreement. Call centers have the obligation to cooperate with the investigation of phone harassment.

Unwanted calls have brought about serious problems. “Website theft, merchant trafficking and communication leaching are the main channels for personal privacy disclosure,” said Chen Jiang, an associate professor from the School of Information Science and Technology at Peking University, adding that precise telemarketing not only affects users’ lives and work, but also may give criminals an opportunity to commit telecom fraud. “Operators should invest necessary resources and technology to double down on the supervision and improvement of voice calls and other forms of communications services,” he said.

Users of Tencent Mobile Manager have reported a total of 399 million junk text messages in the third quarter of 2018, an increase of 31.8 percent year on year, of which the proportion of junk advertising messages accounted for 94.1 percent. “The subscriptions to junk messages are difficult to cancel, which seriously hurts users’ right to knowledge, their freedom of choice and their right to quiet enjoyment,” said Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Communication Law Research Center at China University of Politics and Law, pointing out that in 2012, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee released its Decision on Strengthening Online Information Protection. No organizations or individuals have the right to make calls or send advertising information to personal emails or mobile phones without the permission of these accounts’ users, according to the decision.

“Regulators will fail to curb the prevalent junk messages if they don’t improve their technology,” said Jiang Qiping, secretary general of the Research Institute of Informatization at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noting that regulators should clean up various forms of harassing software. They should also motivate internet platforms and market mechanisms to encourage the development of anti-harassment companies. Meanwhile, greater attention should be paid to users’ feedback so that regulators can update the blacklist in time. 

 

The article was translated from People’s Daily.

(edited by MA YUHONG)