If you use Truecaller, you may already have noticed the change. Calls arriving from numbers that begin with 140 or 1600 no longer carry the red "spam" label many users had come to trust. That is not a bug. It is the result of a direction from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, and it has triggered a public fight between the regulator and the company whose name is a byword for spotting spam calls in India.The dispute matters because it changes what your phone tells you before you decide to pick up. It also raises a larger question that will affect every Indian smartphone user: who gets to decide whether a call is trustworthy, the regulator that assigns the number or the app that reads millions of user complaints.About The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.
As a technology journalist with over sixteen years of experience, I have travelled the world and the seven seas, covered every major tech conference worth its lanyard, chronicled the defining breakthroughs of the last decade and a half, and played a pivotal role in launching some of India’s most important technology publishing platforms across web, print and TV.
