How Truecaller’s Success Depends on India’s Inadequate Privacy Laws

Image: Screenshot, The Caravan

Truecaller, a smartphone app that provides call-blocking and caller ID services to detect and prevent spam calls, is headquartered in Sweden, but India accounts for more than a third of the 5.7 billion unique phone identities in its database. In an investigation for The Caravan, Rachna Khaira found that Truecaller’s success in India might be based on the country’s inadequate privacy laws. Within India, she wrote, anyone who wants access to Truecaller ID features automatically ends up giving the app their entire phone contact list, so Truecaller’s database includes users who did not register and did not consent to having their numbers, information, or metadata identified. Truecaller issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the claims in the Caravan piece, stating among other things that their users’ data is protected.