Defender

Is the Truecaller app really spyware?

Defender 10 months ago

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In a way, yes. You’ll have to learn about the way Truecaller works to understand this.

Truecaller works on a methodology called “crowdsourcing “. Now what is

crowdsourcing? How is Truecaller able to tell you the name of a caller not in your
contacts list? Simply, by ‘asking’ it to someone who has the number in their contacts list.

Every user that uses the Truecaller app submits his contact list to Truecaller’s servers.
Now if any of these contacts calls you and you don’t have that number saved in your
phone, Truecaller tells you who it is by looking at the information stored on their server
by their other users. This is called as crowdsourcing.

The privacy concern here is that the app takes up all your contacts and you don’t have a
choice to allow them or not. I understood the way this app works as soon as I first
installed in on my phone. Since then, I have never used it again because I don’t want
them to ‘spy’ on me like this.

Now of course the company will have a privacy policy in which they will tell that we don’t
take personally identifiable information from user or whatever, but that is what every
company out there says.

So by literal definition, you can’t call it a complete spyware, but it does take your
information like location, contacts, etc. so you have to decide if it is a concern for you or
not. For me, it is.

PS: Almost every app you use on your phone is doing this with or without your
knowledge. Facebook does it, Google does it. It’s actually very difficult in today’s world to
use the internet and not be spied upon by these huge tech giants. So we’re all just
compromising with our privacy and safety

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