What is CAMARA?
CAMARA is an open-source industry initiative that defines a common set of APIs for exposing mobile operator network capabilities to developers and businesses. It is driven by the GSMA — the global association that represents nearly 750 mobile operators worldwide — together with major telecom companies and technology partners.
The project is hosted on GitHub and operates as an open standard: any operator or technology company can contribute to it, and the specifications are publicly available.
The problem CAMARA solves
Before CAMARA, the telecom industry had no common language for exposing network capabilities to third parties. If a bank wanted to use SIM Swap detection as a fraud signal, they would need to negotiate a separate integration with each mobile operator they cared about — Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone, and so on. Each operator had their own API design, authentication model, data format, and contractual terms.
This fragmentation made it prohibitively expensive and slow to build products that relied on operator network data. Only very large companies with dedicated business development teams could realistically do it.
CAMARA solves this by defining a single API specification that all participating operators agree to implement. A service provider integrates once and — in principle — gets access to the same capability from any operator that implements CAMARA.
What CAMARA defines
CAMARA specifications cover several domains of network capabilities. The most widely adopted ones include:
- Identity and fraud signals: Number verification, SIM Swap detection, Device Swap detection
- Know Your Customer (KYC): Age verification, identity attribute matching, customer tenure
- Quality on Demand: Requesting a guaranteed level of network performance for a session
- Consent management: Allowing users to control which service providers can access network data about them
Each specification defines the API endpoints, request and response formats, OAuth scopes, and error codes. Because these are standardized, a developer who has integrated with one CAMARA-compliant operator can switch to another without rewriting their code.
How Open Gateway implements CAMARA
Open Gateway is MasOrange’s implementation of the CAMARA standard. It exposes CAMARA-compliant APIs on behalf of the mobile operators in the MasOrange group — including MásMóvil, Yoigo, and Euskaltel.
The platform acts as a single integration point: service providers authenticate once and access capabilities across all participating operators through the same set of endpoints. Open Gateway handles:
- Routing requests to the correct operator backend based on the user’s phone number
- Enforcing OAuth authorization and ensuring the user has granted consent for the requested capability
- Transforming operator-internal responses into the standardized CAMARA format
This means that, from a developer’s perspective, integrating with Open Gateway is integrating with CAMARA. The operator complexity is abstracted away.
Why CAMARA matters for trust and privacy
A key design principle of CAMARA is that network capabilities are only exposed with explicit user consent. Users authorize specific service providers to access specific pieces of network data about them, and they can revoke that authorization at any time.
This makes CAMARA well-suited for privacy-sensitive use cases. Rather than storing copies of user data, service providers query the operator in real time — the data never leaves the operator’s systems, and the query only succeeds if the user has consented to it.
For businesses, this means that CAMARA-based integrations are easier to comply with data protection regulations like GDPR, because the legal basis for the data access is consent and the data is not transferred or retained.