Data privacy measures are in place for users in India: Truecaller

NEW DELHI: Truecaller, the app that’s well known for caller identification and call blocking on smartphones, has clarified its stand on data privacy and how a user’s information is collected and handled, as well as the options available for users in India. The company has also detailed how the software development toolkit (SDK), used for building the app, works. This comes after certain media reports suggested that Truecaller doesn’t offer any privacy control features for users in India. Truecaller has 300 million monthly active users globally, and there are 220 million active users in India, according to the official numbers shared by the company. All users in India continue to have access to a full-fledged privacy center, much like users in the European Union – the options there are dictated by GDPR (general data protection regulation), which is in force. “We offer easy ways to control how you are seen on Truecaller and to un-list a number permanently. These are GDPR requirements, offered to all users of Truecaller, regardless of location,” says the company in an official statement. A ‘privacy center’ is available in Truecaller ‘settings’ on Android and Apple phones. It allows users to toggle display for availability, view other user profiles privately as well as who can access their profile data, control how ads appear in their app (this is quite relevant for users who are on the ad-supported free tier) and options to stop Truecaller from processing your data and deactivate the account. There is also the option to disconnect any linked profiles for social media apps, including WhatsApp. India is yet to approve and implement the Personal Data Protection Bill as a law. “In the absence of any data protection laws in a country that we operate in, we offer GDPR-derived levels of privacy controls and settings to all our users, regardless of their location,” clarifies Truecaller. The ‘privacy center’ is built on that premise. On Android phones, the API (application programming interface) is available within the operating system’s framework, allowing Truecaller to offer a WhatsApp button within the app interface (you’ll find this if you go into contacts or previous call details). Truecaller confirms that this button is just a quicker link to redirect them to WhatsApp in case they need to start a conversation with the other contact at the time. “We do not actually know if a user is on WhatsApp or not, we simply show the WhatsApp button as a convenience for users,” says Truecaller. In India, Truecaller is available with the ad-supported free tier as well as paid subscription options. While the free tier offers the full scope of incoming call identification as well as spam blocking including for messages, the Premium subscription ( ₹179 for 3 months) adds more call-blocking features, removes in-app ads, and even the option to announce incoming calls. Addressing concerns about the handling of SMS within the app, if a user chooses to allow that, Truecaller confirms that the feature works like any other SMS application – this includes the likes of Google Messages and Microsoft’s SMS Organizer. The additional sorting features, which separate the spam messages and promotional texts from personal conversations, continue to work with machine learning that is processing the data locally on a user’s phone. No data is sent to any servers and no internet connectivity is needed for the machine learning based sorting to complete. We can confirm that on Android phones, you can choose to set Truecaller as the default SMS handling app in Android Settings > Apps > Default > SMS app. On Apple iPhones, Truecaller can be set as the default SMS filtering tool, but your messages are still available within Apple’s iMessage app.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vishal Mathur is Technology Editor for Hindustan Times. When not making sense of technology, he often searches for an elusive analog space in a digital world.
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