TikTok joins operators’ plan to ‘re-digitize’ networks using more personal data

The operators themselves admit this: “What could be done with the current telecommunications networks has already been used to the maximum, there is no more room,” one of their employees admitted to elDiario.es on the first day of the Mobile World Congress. (MWC) in Barcelona, ​​which opened its doors this Monday.

If they continue at this rate, they are doomed to be little more than infrastructure providers for large content platforms: collectors of tolls that the Netflix truck must pay to reach users. Small business compared to what Netflix does by distributing the series to its subscribers from its truck.

The plan for GSMA, the global telecoms employer, to avoid this stagnation is to start milking the cow from the other side: “re-digitizing” its networks thanks to the personal data that operators have and which many companies will pay for. But not in order to buy them and create profiles for personalized advertising in the style of Silicon Valley, but in order to know certain details at a given moment in time with which you can make your services more effective.

There are several examples, but the one that GSMA uses most often is how good it would be for banks, to avoid fraud, to be able to know whether the SIM card of the mobile phone requesting the transfer has been recently cloned. Or if its location is different from the country of origin of the bank account.

Now the services of banks and operators are incompatible in this sense. The same can be said for social networks, which are forced to send a confirmation SMS message when a user wants to register a new account with a phone number, believing that the person receiving it is who they say they are.

The carriers’ plan, which they call Open Gateway, will make this type of data available to companies that need it. And its first major partner is TikTok, which will begin testing this system in Brazil, based on a strategic alliance with Telefónica, announced this Monday at MWC.

47 different networks, one platform

“Telcos have a lot of opportunity in our networks, in all the data we have about our customers. But until now, developers have not been able to use this information and data. This is what we are changing,” said David del Val, director of Open Gateway at Telefónica, when announcing the agreement with TikTok.

GSMA has reached an agreement with 47 mobile operator groups, representing 65% of connections worldwide and providing services in 239 countries, so their networks speak the same language. Together they will function as a single platform. When TikTok asks one of them whether the phone number with which the user is trying to create a new account matches the same mobile phone he uses to do so, he won’t have to ask 47 different questions. This will be an automatic check.

“The Open Gateway initiative, especially around number verification, is very exciting for us as we think about how to offer a seamless user experience with a focus on privacy,” said Michael Modone, head of global agreements at TikTok. “We know that the Open Gateway project will continue to grow as new networks are included,” he admitted.

Technically, operators will create programmable application interfaces (APIs) so that once one is configured to communicate with the services of one of the 47 operators, it can already communicate with all of them.

GSMA presented the Open Gateway project at MWC 2023, and it arrived in Barcelona this year for its final commercial launch. In addition to TikTok and phone number verification, Telefónica explained today that projects are already underway to carry out different types of checks, such as checking where a device is located, when its SIM card was cloned or whether a certain device is connected. to the network.

Privacy issue

“If we are not moving faster, it is due to privacy issues,” project sources told the outlet. “Every step we take must be approved by regulators because if something is done wrong, we will be fined.”

The data sharing system proposed by Open Gateway is similar to the model that the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) is working on to prevent minors from accessing pornography sites and other content prohibited by law. This is a model where the third party who needs the data sends a yes/no question: has this SIM been recently duplicated? Is this user an adult?

In this system, the data is not sent to this third company, and it only receives a positive or negative response to its request. Red light or green light.

“You can ask the telecom: is this right or wrong? And you will receive an affirmative or negative answer,” explained David del Val this Monday: “This is, of course, with the consent of the client. The customer must say whether they allow such background checks.”

“One of the key properties of Open Gateway is confidentiality. From the very beginning, every API we develop is privacy-focused. We need to comply with all laws not only of the European Union, but also of Brazil and all other regions of the world where we are going to operate,” insisted the executive director.

As always, it will be up to AEPD and the rest of the regulatory authorities to give final approval to the operators’ project as it is adopted. A project through which they want to finally become part of the value chain as content providers and stop being just roads that deliver pieces from one place to another.