Bell says permanent approval of call blocking ‘is overwhelmingly in the public interest’

BCE Inc. is urging the CRTC to give it permanent approval to continue to block certain scam voice calls, saying the benefits “are unmistakable” after a nearly year-long trial period in which it blocked 954 million fraudulent calls. Bell first applied to the CRTC to test out the call blocking system in July 2019, having redacted from public view the details of the blocking mechanism. “The challenge is to balance the significant risk of signaling to bad actors our detection mechanisms and thereby provide a 'how to' road map to bad actors that could be used to thwart this proposed anti-nuisance calling proposal, against the need to provide sufficient notice of the proposal to potentially impacted parties,” Bell reiterated in its most recent reply to the proceeding, published Friday, which was also heavily redacted. The CRTC approved a 90-day trial for the call blocking scheme in July 2020 despite objections out of concern for net neutrality, competition, and Bell collecting metadata on calls that merely transit its network. In October 2020, the CRTC granted Bell’s request for an indefinite extension of the scheme until the commission rules on whether or not to make it permanent. “This extension has been beneficial in a number of ways,” Bell wrote in its Friday reply. “First and foremost, it has protected millions of Canadians and businesses from receiving hundreds of millions of fraud and scam calls. It is also beneficial because it provides the commission with 12 reports cataloguing the results of our blocking system... A third benefit is our ability to share one year's worth of our observations about the evolving methods bad actors apply to undermine and work around the blocking system.” Bell also told the CRTC that there has not been a single instance where it has a false positive, defined as inadvertently or incorrectly blocking a legitimate call. Other companies' replies to Bell’s application were only partially made public due to a CRTC directive that Bell allow selected parties to look at the details of its call blocking mechanism provided they sign an NDA. In its replies, TekSavvy Solutions Inc. asked the CRTC to implement a framework for regulating artificial intelligence, the use of automated decision-making, and machine learning. It suggested for guidance that the commission look to the government’s recently issued Directive on Automated Decision-Making and Artificial Intelligence Impact Assessment (“AIA”) tool, which aims to improve automated decision systems used in service delivery. “There are numerous flaws in this reasoning,” Bell said in response Friday. “First, the cited federal policy documents are inapplicable. This is not a government-run procurement in which Bell proposes to offer AI services to the Federal Government to be used to make decisions about governmental clients. The application has nothing to do with the federal government's procurement of services.” The company also elaborated on the ways in which these frameworks would be inapplicable based on the way Bell’s AI system works, however, the information was redacted. In a related intervention, Fenwick McKelvey, director of Algorithmic Media Observatory at Concordia University, along with Reza Rajabiun, research fellow, wrote that the “public record of this proceeding remains incomplete” and “inconsistent” with established processes at the CRTC and best practices in administrative law. They noted Bell did not provide an AIA of its system on the public record and that there was no evidence to determine if Bell’s Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) was sufficient. Bell has since responded that the “professors' reliance on its AIA statement is misplaced'' because they could have signed an NDA to access the confidential information. It added that even the commission “well understood that the need for an AIA would become moot once NDA signatory interveners signed the NDA and gained access to this critical piece of information.” Bell requested Friday that the CRTC reject the criticism for its PIA, writing that TekSavvy, who also criticized the assessment, “alleged, without any supporting evidence, that Bell employees were accessing customers' data and ‘harvesting’ or ‘scraping’ it for illegitimate purposes.” Bell said its call blocking system is not collecting personal information as defined under privacy law and pointed out in its reply that the commission itself, when it first approved the 90-day trial, concluded the system "analyzes telecommunications traffic in order to flag anomalies that suggest possible fraudulent and scam activity." “The analysis of such aggregate data, that does not relate to or identify individuals, is not personal information and therefore does not give rise to privacy concerns,” Bell further argued in its reply. “We continue to apply each of the stringent privacy and data security safeguards, unchanged, since the Commission approved them as part of the 90-day blocking trial.” Telus Communications, which “generally” approves of Bell’s application, told the CRTC in its intervention that “it should not be assumed that Bell will always be as successful or that other parties implementing blocking will be as successful.” It suggested to the commission redacted concerns and amendments to Bell’s proposed process for investigating and reporting complaints regarding false positives. “Given the exacting standards that we already apply before determining to block, demonstrated by the absence of any false positive complaints to date, the likelihood of such false positive investigations should continue to be exceedingly rare,” Bell wrote in the unredacted parts of its response to Telus’ concerns. Bell also noted it will continue to engage in good faith investigations into complaints of false positives by adhering to a 24-hour limit from the time it is notified of a false positive complaint to its resolution, and unblock all telecommunications blocked within that same time period. -- Reporting by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca and editing by Hannah Daley at hdaley@thewirereport.ca

Bell says permanent approval of call blocking ‘is overwhelmingly in the public interest’

News | 07/23/2021 6:46 pm EDT

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