The quest into the truth of truecaller
Who hasn’t heard of Truecaller?
Truecaller is adored in India. In India, there are around 130 million smartphone users who have Truecaller loaded. This represents over half of the app’s worldwide user base. “We celebrate having accomplished a significant feat in Truecaller history with a grateful heart. India alone today has more than 100 million Truecaller users, a country far from our Swedish headquarters but dear to our hearts. The DNA of Truecaller bears a permanent imprint of its affection for India “The business recently mentioned.
Something that helps you deal with spammers and filters out people trying to sell you insurance, trading accounts, and credit cards. And Truecaller has saved lives since India has the bad distinction of being Asia’s spam capital.
In its privacy policy, Truecaller describes its position on data acquisition as follows:
When you download and use the Truecaller Apps, Truecaller will gather, utilise, and store your personal data as well as the data from any devices you use to engage with our services. Geolocation, Your IP address, device ID or identification number, handset manufacturer and type, gadget and hardware settings, ID for advertising, ad data, system software, operator, IMSI, connection information, screen resolution, usage data, device record and event details, incoming and outgoing calls and messages, times and dates of calls, duration of calls, the Truecaller App version you use, and other information based on your device may be included in this data.
However, not everyone believes that Truecaller is a good company working to rid India of spam calls. In particular, Viceroy Research They are a research firm that publishes reports on companies that are traded publicly. And their ultimate goal is to locate shady businesses with questionable financials in order to profit from stock market bets. And Truecaller is their most recent target. In a damning article titled “Truecaller’s True Colors,” they have dismantled the company’s business strategy piece by piece.
You can claim that privacy is illusory. What happens, though, if you didn’t specifically sign away your data? What if businesses are still able to obtain your personal information and profit from it?
That is the charge made against Truecaller.
How it begins:
After an individual downloads the app, Truecaller requests access to their phonebook. They peruse the user’s phonebook and extract all of their contacts. Even if you haven’t installed or enrolled with Truecaller in the first place, your name could be included in the list of contacts. Despite the fact that you didn’t formally agree to any of this, your information is now in their database. It was all due to the fact that you were in someone else’s contact list. And when someone installed Truecaller, they unintentionally waived your right to privacy.
It is worthy to note that currently the said app has 300 million active users per month, but it has an incredible 5.7 billion contacts in its database!
However, it’s not the only issue.
Data privacy regulation:
Europe introduced the General Data Protection Regulation a few years ago (GDPR). It’s a collection of laws designed to safeguard people’s privacy. Assume, for illustration, that a user from France registered and granted Truecaller access to their contact list. Because the GDPR forbids such actions, Truecaller would be unable to skim the phonebook and add names and numbers to its database.
However, Truecaller made the decision to develop a workaround. In some senses, it became a “Indian” firm and transferred all of its data centres to India in order to get around GDPR. After all, India doesn’t currently have a law governing the protection of personal data. They can contend that Indian users are not covered by the GDPR.
Truecaller also occasionally exhibits non-Indian business behaviour. Another accusation made by Viceroy Research is that Truecaller is treated as a Swedish corporation for tax purposes (because India has a higher corporate tax rate).
Here’s another component that the research discovered :
Your phone book is accessible to Truecaller. However, it has access to your SMS inbox as well. You might find notices about bank transactions in your mailbox. And it is claimed that Truecaller used this data to create financial profiles.
Conclusion
Problems with app security can arise from a variety of sources, not only app downloads. Even utilising authorised apps might lead to issues because they capture information you wouldn’t otherwise wish to share. Permissions are yet another difficulty with apps. Because we frequently receive requests from apps to access data (like our images) or device features (like our microphones), we occasionally just give permission to every app without thinking. It’s critical to understand the rights you provide each programme and the data they can access. You may want to limit access and permissions to only what is necessary for them to function for you when you are reviewing them.
