91–100 of 137 posts
People don't know privacy and not aware of misuses in India.
And phone number in India is not considered private info. We keep putting banner with number everywhere offline to online.
Is true caller any different than an automated yellow pages?
For one, yellow pages was centrally managed by the phone company you were a customer of, and opt-in (you may be thinking of the white pages for residential customers, which was opt-out). Also, the information in the white/yellow pages is curated and just the name provided by the customer. TrueCaller gets every tidbit of information that your contacts decide to use to annotate your number. Many people use more in the…
I would say most people would use contacts like “Joe Plumber” or “Maria Tinder”.
Truecaller is kind of a substitute for identifying spam calls where I grew up where there is no alternative. Also helps when someone is calling you and you want to avoid answering them.
Most people definitely don’t care that it’s taking all your contact info though the utility of the app is well worth it.
I find TrueCaller immensely useful. Especially to filter out and block spam callers. Spam calls and robocalls are a HUGE problem in India. TrueCaller flashes spam callers in red, you can reject the call and save a few precious minutes of your life. About half of the calls I receive a day are spam calls. If I were to answer them all and then reject it would be a waste of time and energy.
It's heartening to know that it isn't just Americans whose phones are overrun by Indian spam callers.
Americans have avoided this problem by making the overwhelming majority of phone calls spam, so any call not from an existing contact is ignored.
I would love if that were the case, but I don't see how workable it is because caller id is spoofable, and people commonly need to pick up calls from local unknown numbers like doctors offices, mechanic, etc whose number you may not have(or who may call from a whole bank of numbers). The best bet is to try to get a phone number from across the country. If you live in NY, get a phone number from a city you have no rel…
I find TrueCaller immensely useful. Especially to filter out and block spam callers. Spam calls and robocalls are a HUGE problem in India. TrueCaller flashes spam callers in red, you can reject the call and save a few precious minutes of your life. About half of the calls I receive a day are spam calls. If I were to answer them all and then reject it would be a waste of time and energy.
It's heartening to know that it isn't just Americans whose phones are overrun by Indian spam callers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife installed TrueCaller on her phone. She is technical but not a developer. I asked if she knows they steal your contact list and spy on you and her answer was “so? It’s just phone numbers and names and they need to get the data somewhere as they are providing the service for free” I live in a developed country and we have a high standard of living. Giving this anecdote to illustrate many people genuinely don’t…
India has a huge problem with spam / robo callers. Also its common for individuals to have more than 1 phone number, see how popular dual sim phones are. Also true caller adds security when you're from an under represented or a minority groups. I especially know women who use Truecaller to make sure they know who is calling / texting them from new numbers.
Having multiple SIMs in India will go away, or at least become something only the rich have, it's only a matter of time. This is because having that second SIM is no longer cost-free.
Multiple SIMs in India were a side-effect of it being near-free to have a prepaid SIM to receive calls. This was subsidized by high calling charges (calling from one part of India to another was expensive) and even higher data prices.
Then Jio entered the market with a ground-up 4G network and said, this is BS. Calls and texts are free, with no reasonable limits. We'll only charge you for data, and we'll provide 1.5GB a day or more -- starting at INR 150 a month paid 3 months at a time. The party ended for a lot of operators at that point as they hemorrhaged customers. Most operators simply folded or merged until now there are only 3 private players and one non-serious state player.
Driven by pressure from Jio, the other two private players (Airtel and Vi, aka Vodafone) have decided to amp up monthly charges for pre-paid phones. Essentially, if you're not spending at least INR 120 a month they don't want you. India has number portability so it's not like you're held hostage or anything.
INR 120 sounds super low but it's not for a lot of Indians who earn salaries closer to India's median per-capita income, and also it's an extremely limited level of service, for actual use you need to pay more -- typically around INR 250 monthly for 1.5GB data per day (remember, most Indians don't have wired Internet so 1.5GB data per day is not excessive). Jio and its competitors have hiked prices substantially, of course.
The last refuge for people on limited budgets is the state-run telco, BSNL, but the government will sell it -- it's only a matter of time. Expect prices to spike again, then.
Anyway, multiple SIMs in India are increasingly less viable for ordinary people. It'll take a while for behaviour to change, but it'll change.
That's the problem with maintaining absolute privacy. The privacy and security of your information depends on other people even if you do everything to save it.
When you install the app they steal your contact list and populate their database that way. Most people are unaware of this, or don't care since we are a third world country and privacy is seen as a first world problem. The vast majority of thinking here is not very sophisticated about these types of topics. Only a very tiny fraction of the total population is averse to sharing personal information like phone numbers…
What if you avoid using the system default contacts store, i.e., keep it empty, and instead you use an app like OpenContacts.^1 To apps like TruCaller, it will appear the the user has no contacts.
1. https://f-droid.org/packages/opencontacts.open.com.openconta...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth noting that Instagram does this too, under the guise of "Find Your Friends." When you sign up for a new account, they aggressively prompt you to sync your contacts list with the app, and will continually prompt you in the future if you choose not to. Nearly all of my friends have this enabled. This is not a one-time sync, either. It will upload future new contacts and changes. And, finally, if you manage t…
> When you sign up for a new account, they aggressively prompt you to sync your contacts list with the app, and will continually prompt you in the future if you choose not to. Even everyone's much-loved Signal does this. Contacts sync is presented as "not now" or "yes forever." The "not now" message even explicitly says they'll bug you again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue here is that your contacts did not agree to you sharing their information with a third-party.
I don’t know. If you give me a soda, that soda becomes mine to do what I want. I can pour it on the ground, drink it, or give it to someone else. I feel the same way about ways to contact someone. With today’s technology, they can block people they don’t like but it’s not my job to be their gate-keeper.