| APrIGF 2024 Session Proposal Submission Form | |||||||||||||
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| Part 1 - Lead Organizer | |||||||||||||
| Contact Person | |||||||||||||
| Mr. Kazuhiro Kitamura | |||||||||||||
| Organization / Affiliation (Please state "Individual" if appropriate) * | |||||||||||||
| Japan Internet Providers Association (JAIPA) | |||||||||||||
| Designation | |||||||||||||
| Chairperson of Mobile Department | |||||||||||||
| Gender | |||||||||||||
| Male | |||||||||||||
| Economy of Residence | |||||||||||||
| Japan | |||||||||||||
| Primary Stakeholder Group | |||||||||||||
| Technical Community | |||||||||||||
| Part 2 - Session Proposal | |||||||||||||
| Session Title | |||||||||||||
| Messaging scam and combatting to protect human rights and democracy | |||||||||||||
| Session Format | |||||||||||||
| Panel Discussion (60 minutes) | |||||||||||||
| Where do you plan to organize your session? | |||||||||||||
| Onsite at the venue (with online moderator for questions and comments from remote participants) | |||||||||||||
| Specific Issues for Discussion | |||||||||||||
| Messaging services, including SMS and OTT apps such as WhatsApp, the LINE, and Email with global coverage and reach, these messaging services are key infrastructure and the number of messaging transactions is rising everyday. That messaging network is the biggest platform supporting activities of, commercial, political, human rights, and social. Messaging Scams is the biggest social issue in recent years in many countries. Criminal groups have been abusing messaging service platforms to rob people out of their money. Telecom operators and Governments in many countries have been trying to reduce that crime. How detailed should the content of messages be grabbed by telecommunication carriers and their regulatory bodies for filtering services or other countermeasures to function effectively? What is the appropriate messaging security? To what extent should we allow telecom operators and countries to intervene - Today we must discuss the conflict between people's free expression, human rights, democracy and crime control. | |||||||||||||
| Describe the Relevance of Your Session to APrIGF | |||||||||||||
| Our session will 1) describe the messaging services and messaging scam situation in each country by panelists, 2) share countermeasures, their positive effects, and concerns to maintaining security, and 3) discuss with other participants how to secure freedom and human rights. We aim to share the experiences of how they balance security and privacy, maintaining human rights and democracy, and to discuss with participants the ideal society with an advanced global network. |
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| Methodology / Agenda (Please add rows by clicking "+" on the right) | |||||||||||||
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| Moderators & Speakers Info (Please complete where possible) | |||||||||||||
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| Please explain the rationale for choosing each of the above contributors to the session. | |||||||||||||
| Blocking unauthorized messages requires verification of message content, which needs to be balanced with the protection of human rights and democracy. This session will promote more concrete discussions by learning about the situation of crimes and measures taken by telecommunication carriers and governments in various countries around the world. Kazuhiro Kitamura : Moderator Kuo-Wei Wu : Facilitator, Taiwanese government issues and telecom situation Luciana Conte Reyes: Brazil and Latin America region situation and measurements JOFAN LIN: Situations with the major app communication, criminal trend and countermeasures, Government relationship. Christiane Gillespie-Jones: Australia situation and Joint program combating with Australian Government. Alpana Kaushal: Middle east, Asia pacific and global trend of messaging Koji Yasukagawa: Japanese situations and Joint program between Industry group and Japanese Government. |
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| If you need assistance to find a suitable speaker to contribute to your session, or an onsite facilitator for your online-only session, please specify your request with details of what you are looking for. | |||||||||||||
| N/A | |||||||||||||
| Please declare if you have any potential conflict of interest with the Program Committee 2024. | |||||||||||||
| No | |||||||||||||
| Are you or other session contributors planning to apply for the APrIGF Fellowship Program 2024? | |||||||||||||
| No | |||||||||||||
| Brief Summary of Your Session | |||||||||||||
| Communication services are one of the most popular and indispensable applications on the Internet as a key infrastructure. Taking advantage of this popularity of this application, criminal groups are sending out scams to steal money from users to deceive them, and it is becoming a major social security issue worldwide. The commoditisation of the smartphone makes the scam spread rapidly, and the rise of AI also makes scams very sophisticated and difficult to detect. To tackle this issue, different sectors in every country including governments, telecom operators,civil sectors are trying to solve this problem with different approaches in each country. There are some points that need to be discussed to address this issue. Security measures often conflict with human rights such as privacy, especially when the measures are related to the content of the communications. How can we balance security measures and privacy? Governments tend to make rules to protect againt fraud by forcing measures such as monitoring or blocking scams, but this may violate the basic human rights such as freedom of speech. How can we make regulations without violating human rights? In the operation phase of the measures, we need to monitor the situation to get feedback that the balance between security measures and human right. How can we ensure transparency and accountability in the implementation of measures? In this session, speakers provided an overview of the situation in their country in the Asia-Pacific region, which is Australia, Taiwan, UAE and Japan, and share their experiences with the audience and discuss these issues. |
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| Substantive Summary of the Key Issues Raised and the Discussion | |||||||||||||
| Speakers reported huge losses due to scam and fraud. For example,500 million AUD in Australia in 2022. To combat this, several measures have been taken in Asia-Pacific countries. These include the suspension of telephone subscriptions by thier message or voice senders, the use of anti-phishing software, the registration of alphanumeric sender ID and public awareness campaigns. One of the measures adopted by most counties of speakers is the monitoring and blocking of scams. Telecom operators in the UAE and Taiwan are using AI technology to detect and block scams. In terms of policy-making process for monitoring and blocking scams, Australiauses multi-stakeholder process with industry players such as banks, telcos,and digital platforms, and related to the respective regulators and consumer representatives. They have established a "Scam code" for scam calls and SMS in 2020. In this process, the blocking of scams as an exception to the Telecommunications Act in Australia. This measure seems to be very effective due to the fact that the number of blocked messages amounts is very high, at 0.5B messages since December 2023. On the contrary, in Japan, blocking scams is not allowed because of the secrecy of communications required by the constitution, but telecom operators in Japan provide anti-scam filering service on an opt-in basis with the consent of their customers. The measures taken by each country are all based on their laws, but the difference occurred depending on their legal system and how they deal with human rights. |
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| Conclusions and Suggestions of Way Forward | |||||||||||||
| We found that the blocking of scam messages are commonly used as a measure to combat scams, although some countries such as Japan are very strict to take this measure according to their constitution. The blocking or monitoring is done to scan messages which leads to human rights issues such as privacy and freedom of speech. The legal structure for implementing the blocking differs from country to country based on its legal system, but consensus must be made through the discussion with related parties. In this sense, Australia has made a good system by involving multi-stakeholders and making consensus among them. The review of the implementation of policy-making process and their experience in Australia is very helpful for other counties, so the further detalied information sharing and discussion on it among other Asian-Pacific countries is a very good opportunity to learn how they can implement the silimar scheme in their countries, what is the bottleneck for the implementation and how they to solve the problem. | |||||||||||||
| Number of Attendees (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||
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| Gender Balance in Moderators/Speakers (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||
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| How were gender perspectives, equality, inclusion or empowerment discussed? Please provide details and context. | |||||||||||||
| Our session had an equal number of male and female speakers. The speakers talked mainly about the situation of scam and fraud in their countries and the measures presented regardless of gender, so there was little discussion of gender perspectives,equality, inclusion or empowerment. From the point of view of victims of fraud and scam, there is a difference between the genders in the trend of how they are targeted, presented by JUSA, Japan. Females tend to be targeted by special scam and males by investment and romance scams. Analysing this difference between genders may make more effective method to prevent scams. |
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| Consent | |||||||||||||
 I agree that my data can be submitted to forms.for.asia and processed by APrIGF organizers for the program selection of APrIGF 2024. |
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