What's in a name? Is CNAP enough to keep you safe?

A new service called Calling Name Presentation or CNAP, is being rolled out in India and many are under the impression that scam and frauds over phone calls will be history. The belief is that calls will be a whole lot safer because, thanks to CNAP, one can see who is calling. But is that really all it takes to make a phone call safe - a name? Speaking in Shakespeare's legendary play "Romeo and Juliet," Juliet famously asks "what's in a name," going on to point out that a name actually meant very little - "That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet."

CNAP shows us a name, but is it actually that of the person calling?

Juliet could actually have been talking about CNAP. Yes, it does add a name to the number calling us, but apart from that it tells us nothing at all. We do not know the real context of the phone call or the intent of the person behind it. It is true that every person getting a phone connection has to submit KYC (know your customer) documents to the telecom operator, and therefore a supposedly ‘verified’ name can be displayed with a number.

On paper, that makes CNAP seem very safe - it shows us the name of the person in whose name the phone number is registered. And that name appears on legal documentation. So if something does go wrong, all one has to do is approach the authorities or security agencies with the name and the number, and the wrongdoer will be apprehended. But does it actually work like this?

The assumption that a scammer or fraudster would call a victim using a number which can be easily traced back to them is flawed. Will a thief commit robbery and leave a visiting card behind? No criminal is that naive. What's more, in a country like India, phone connections are often registered in one person's name but are used by others. It is very common to see a single person getting multiple connections in their name and handing them out to be used by members of their family, employees, domestic help and drivers and so on. CNAP will show you the name of the person in whose name the connection has been registered, but the person using it might be someone else. There is no information on whether they are scammers or even have a track record of spamming others.

A single-purpose tool without context: Where CNAP comes up short

This absence of contextual information beyond a name is CNAP's biggest shortcoming, Unlike other calling identification solutions (for example, the most popular one is Truecaller, which has more than half a billion users all over the world), which come with a number of safeguards and security protocols, CNAP revolves mainly around adding an identity in the form of a name to a phone number. For instance, Truecaller has safeguards in place to identify unwanted callers and block them, has a verification process for trusted callers who get a trusted blue badge, has an AI call screening process and even comes with fraud insurance and family protection.

CNAP has, at the time of writing, none of these features. It is a single-purpose tool which depends on operator records rather than a community, which revises and updates information based on constant feedback. It also needs to be remembered that CNAP works only on calls being made on telecom networks and within the country. If you get a call on the Internet (say from WhatsApp or another messaging service) or from another nation, CNAP will not be able to identify the caller, while a service like Truecaller has the ability to do so.

Can a name alone make calls safe?

While CNAP does add some more information about an unknown caller, it would be naive to say that it improves user safety. If anything, it can actually lull a user into a false sense of security by adding a name to an unknown number. The user has no way of knowing whether this name is actually the caller's own or someone else's. They have no further information on the caller and no way of finding out. All they have is a name. And that, as Juliet pointed out, is seldom enough. To paraphrase Shakespeare, "a scammer by any other name would be just as dangerous."

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