Homo sapiens carry a natural behaviour of facilitating. Humans always get attracted to what seems easy and simplified to them, no matter if it breaches their privacy. Truecaller is just another example of that. In the modern-day 21st century, we have all been dealing with spam calls that sell their credit cards, insurance policies, data packages, trading accounts, and many more.
In order to detect these spam calls causing us a headache, Truecaller came as a saver. It helps us to identify incoming calls from an unknown number but at the cost of revealing our hidden identity. In no time, the app has breached hundreds and thousands of personal data and information, keeping people in a blindfolded loop.
Truecaller, an apparent saver for caller identification
TrueCaller is basically a smartphone application that has features of caller identification, call blocking, flash messaging, and call recording, among others. The 2009 founded company by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is a privately held company developed by True Software Scandinavia AB.
The company carries its biggest market in India with the monthly active users (MAU) at 235.5 million at the end of its second-quarter results. As reported by the Business Standard, Truecaller’s Q2 daily active users in India was 194.4 million up from 167.3 million in the April-June quarter of 2021. Further, India continues to be its most prominent contributor in terms of revenue at 78.9 per cent.
Amid all this bloom that the company carries, it also holds an allegation that made rounds over the internet claiming that ‘Truecaller doesn’t care about privacy if you are in India.’
A spectrum of loopholes in Truecaller
Recently, a research company putting out reports on publicly traded companies, Viceroy Research, came down at revealing Truecaller. In its scathing report titled “Truecaller’s True Colors” objected to the company’s business model and also highlighted its loopholes.
To simply understand the strategy of Truecaller, it’s imperative to note that it carries a massive database of users. For instance, once someone installs the app, Truecaller gets permission to access their contact list. It looks at the phonebook and scrapes all the user’s contacts. The list of references could even include you, irrespective of whether you have downloaded or registered with Truecaller or not. Forcibly, you are now a part of the company’s database even though you didn’t explicitly consent to any of the permission. It’s all because you were a part of someone else’s contact list, and that someone unintentionally signed away your privacy rights when they installed Truecaller.
Such incidents won’t be successful in the case of strict data protection policies. However, that is a big question in India. India currently lacks legislation for data protection. And this gave an edge to Truecaller which resulted in the company moving all its data centres to India, surpassing the other country’s introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which doesn’t carry any base in India.
However, Viceroy Research believes otherwise. They describe that the GDPR is applicable to all its users including Indian users. On the other hand, it also describes that Truecaller doesn’t always act as an Indian company. For taxation purposes, it becomes a Swedish company because India has a higher corporate tax rate. In addition, Viceroy Research also found that the “Enhanced Search” feature on Truecaller, which gives access to everything like name, address, and email, was automated until 28 September for new users in India.
Though Truecaller scraps all the allegations surrounding it, it’s a matter of fact that the privacy of hundreds and thousands of people is getting breached. It’s an immediate need to curb this menace and regulate strict data protection policies.
Read more: Data is a valuable asset and India needs a Data breach law
The Modi government is high on protecting the people
With the increasing internet population and expanding digitisation, the need for data security has become pivotal. Over the last few years, India has seen a drastic increase in cases of privacy breaches and apps like Truecaller are its contributors. Over the years, India has become one of the biggest victims of high-tech crimes. More than 1.1 million cyber-attacks were reported across India in 2020. And this saw a significant increase compared to previous years around 400 cases.
There have such numerous cases hindering our data privacy. The latest Pegasus hacking spyware leak in July 2021, among others, proves that cybersecurity is no more a choice but has become a necessity. While the unprecedented vulnerabilities cannot be eliminated, understanding technology gaps, and allocating the right resources to the right place can be an escape from solving the problem and protecting the people.
With the capability of banning almost 54 Chinese apps for national security, its pivotal for the Indian government to take some serious action against apps like Truecaller. With a strong approach to serving the people, the Modi government should come down heavily on the provable biggest data thief in India.
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