Betrayed by an app she had never heard of • Hacker News Board

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#141

Post by pxtail » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:21 AM UTC

ComodoHacker wrote: post #42

TrueCaller is Facebook's face recognition for phone numbers. They are building shadow profiles using some user-valuable bait feature. For TrueCaller, most of its value is in fighting spam. So, unlike Facebook, it's not only users who compromise privacy of others, it's spammers who steal our privacy. We should examine spam fighting solutions for email, IM and others, they might be involved in the same business model.…

> TrueCaller is Facebook's face recognition for phone numbers

This is very good analogy - in fact I think that it's even more dangerous because when it comes to Facebook people are slightly more aware about privacy-related issues. I'm pretty sure that TrueCaller extensively profiles users, links all possible connections, gathers data - Facebook might not know that one visited certain doctor or that one has some medical conditions, TrueCaller? Who knows. It is possible to gather a lot of data and build detailed profile just by linking who calls who.

Additionally according to HN comments [0] one doesn't just simply "opt out", truly terrifying

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058218

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#142

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:39 AM UTC

I've never had an account with them so I tried to search my number to see what data they had on me. Says I need to sign in.

For that reason I've unlisted: https://www.truecaller.com/unlisting

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#143

Post by thesaint » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:44 AM UTC

So really the title of this story should be 'Betrayed by a contact who is totally clueless..'No?

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#144

Post by inapis » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

mola wrote: post #65

RikNieu wrote: post #23

I find TrueCaller very usefull. I used to get sooo many sales and robo-calls a day that I seriously considered just getting rid of my phone. Now they get automatically blocked or I can just put them on a profile that they ring silently and hang up immediately. I get that this can be dangerous for journalists, but shouldn't they maybe investigate alternative ways of contacting sources privately? Mobile numbers are not…

If Robocalls are the problem, Truecaller isn't the solution. Regulations against unwanted harassment is. Robocalls are not a force of nature where our only recourse is a technological solution. They are a result of a human choice, where the absolute majority of individual think it's a menace. So our recourse is legal. band-aid solutions like Truecaller cause more problems. The Truecaller product is not a usual commod…

While I agree with your sentiment, in practice, relying on legislative options is not foolproof and is also a band-aid. You require a lot of human cooperation which, to be honest, is not trivial to achieve in 2019. Second, technology frequently outpaces legislative actions. You can relay a spam call/sms around the world and the receiver, her ISP or her government would still be completely unable to fix the issue.

Honestly, I want disposable phone numbers (which are still compatible with public networks) something akin to email aliases. So if one number gets a lot of spam calls, I can just route it to /dev/null.

We need a complete array of legislative + technological solutions.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#145

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

Okay. So the weak link again is the endpoint. The human. There is really nothing to see here. My God. This will never stop.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#146

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:48 AM UTC

yardstick wrote: post #94

diebeforei485 wrote: post #22

I have mixed feelings this. Spam calls are very much a real problem in the US as well - I get around ten per day and it's a constant annoyance.

You don’t need to know the “contact name” of a spam caller, algorithms when reporting spam should work just on the number and so when it calls you, it should just show a Probably Spam flag, nothing about the identity unless of course the caller has given their consent to provide that info.

This seems to be how it works in the most recent version of Android and it serves me very well.

If it's suspected spam it will tell me (I can also report spam calls). If it's a business listed with Google Places it will show the business name.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#147

Post by bscphil » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:51 AM UTC

skizo wrote: post #95

johnchristopher wrote: post #89

This is great. I logged into the website to check if my number was collected. It is. So I click on "suggest a better name" in a naive attempt to erase myself from the grid. I can't because they "don't collect personal information about private individuals in the EU".

you can unlist your number here - https://www.truecaller.com/unlisting

This didn't work for me the first three times I tried. It said I had to log into the app and deactivate my account (which of course I can't do because I don't have an account). It eventually claims to have worked on the fourth try, but I have no way of checking because it doesn't let you look up numbers without being logged in.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#148

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:53 AM UTC

yesforwhat wrote: post #10

nutjob2 wrote: post #9

The problem here is that once you give out a number then it's public in some sense. The person you give it to can pass it on, even inadvertently. The smart thing to do is to have a public number and a private number. It makes no sense to call cabs with the same number you use to contact sources or whatever. This is easily done with dual sim phones and can be taken much further with Google Voice or other dial-in phone…

> The smart thing to do is to have a public number and a private number. What's the easiest way to do this?

I have our work VOIP account set up on my Android phone. It's integrated into the dialer and works for incoming and outgoing calls. On outgoing calls I have to select whether I want to use the SIM or the VOIP account.

It's a geographic (local) number to our office and costs £7.99 per month. Seems like it would be easy enough to add one for personal use as well.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#149

Post by eager_noob » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

ddhdhdhdhdhdh wrote: post #104

gcb0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blackberry android phones have a feature where it notifies you when any app accessed some resource that requires OS level permissions, such as contacts, gps, etc. Whatsapp and other facebook apps, access my contact list every 3 minutes.

Looks like a good reason to delete these apps.

Quite an unfortunate situation for those who would like public pressure on apps to minimize the permissions they ask for. Atleast in whatsapp's case it would be hard to convince most people to stop allowing contact access to the app as being able to send messages to all your phone contacts without any setup on your part is probably one of the major reasons that whatsapp became so popular.

Re: Betrayed by an app she had never heard of

#150

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Fri, May 31, 2019, 10:55 AM UTC

powerslacker wrote: post #4

That's not a privacy violation. Her data wasn't collected, a series of numbers was tagged. The person tagging the number could be entering the tag as anything they want.

Revealing someone's name and occupation to random strangers isn't a privacy violation?