Experts call Airtel’s spam tool promising, but flag privacy issues

While the artificial intelligence-powered, real-time network solution for spam detection launched by Bharti Airtel last week comes as a huge relief to its subscribers, experts say that the company needs to put in place more safeguards to ensure that privacy issues are not compromised.

To begin with, the way Airtel checks spam calls or messages is by analysing the usage pattern of the caller — frequency, call duration, etc. Implicit in the process is that it monitoring the call data records of subscribers.