Alarming increase in “Trojan Horse” Apps

I was an early adopter of the Truecaller App and initially found it indispensable: When an unknown number called, it would identify the caller for me and indicate the level of spam. That was very helpful – or was it? After doing some analysis, I’ve now removed the app from my phone completely. Here’s why:

1. Truecaller uses my private contact list to match phone numbers to names. By using the app, I’m actually sharing information about all my private contacts, without my friends, family and customers knowing (let alone agreeing) to it. Truecaller sells this information.
2. I suffer the time and data spent on app updates in the hopes of a better user experience, but Truecaller’s ‘updates’ include ever more aggressive marketing, more intrusive notifications and (frankly) tricks to trip me into using more of their services.
3. I often miss legitimate calls from important companies because they are flagged as spam. Many customers probably never realise why they aren’t getting responses to important and the organisations I’ve spoken to you are often not aware either.
4. Truecaller has every incentive to increase phone spam, not to reduce it. Their livelihood depends on it. I heard a radio caller recently say that he used Truecaller on his private phone as he got a lot of spam calls, but he didn’t need it on his business phone. He seemed to implicitly trust that Truecaller has not actually sold his number (or his entire phonebook) to spammers.

It’s not only Truecaller that I’ve grown to distrust. My point is that whilst Google and Facebook now under scrutiny, how many smaller companies are violating privacy.  I even hear so-called ‘experts’ promoting Truecaller as a solution, without giving any disclaimer. I also single Truecaller out because they harvest and sell the data of our unwitting contacts without their knowledge, let alone consent.