Bell offers to reveal AI call blocking system to critics

BCE Inc. says it is willing to share information with critics of its plan to combat scam phone calls using artificial intelligence — as long as they don’t tell anyone else. In its initial application to the CRTC, Bell kept most of the details of how it plans to use AI in its call blocking confidential, drawing a number of interventions filed with the regulator expressing concerns about privacy and data collection. In a letter sent to the CRTC on Oct. 25, Bell said the company understands intervenors’ “concerns about the lack of public disclosure about the details of the trial and wish to provide them greater detail about how our proposed call blocking will work.” Bell is asking intervenors to sign a non-disclosure agreement, however, because the company says the “confidentiality concern in this case involves preventing bad actors seeking to use voice calling” and figuring out just how Bell is trying to block them. In July, Bell asked the CRTC if it could conduct a 90-day test of a system for blocking “certain known, verified, fraudulent scam voice telephony calls” on its networks. The CRTC had initially ordered the telecom companies in December 2018 to set up call blocking system for numbers that don’t conform to “established numbering plans,” and told them to do it by December of this year. In its Friday letter to the regulator, Bell said that after reviewing the interventions, some of the intervenors have “raised objections based upon factual inaccuracies, or worse, sheer speculation.” Some of those objections were from parties who were concerned about Bell performing blocking trials on calls that simply passed through its networks. The Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC) wrote in its submission that “Bell should not be permitted to experiment on voice traffic that does not belong to it.” Iristel Inc., which had filed an intervention objecting to the blocking of calls originating on other networks passing through Bell’s network, said Monday that the offer from Bell does not go far enough. The offer is “a step forward but doesn’t change anything because they shouldn’t be touching transit wholesale traffic between carriers where they are the middle man,” Iristel CEO Samer Bishay wrote in an email to The Wire Report. “Every carrier should handle their end users and empower them with the right tools to block unwanted calls. It shouldn’t be forced on anyone,” he wrote.

Bell offers to reveal AI call blocking system to critics

Brief | October 28, 2019

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Bell offers to reveal AI call blocking system to critics

Brief | October 28, 2019

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