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TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

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Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#111
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India, privacy is always secondary. I remember, last time I was at jewelry shop in Western MH, I had to provide PAN card or Aadhar card since purchase warranted this check. W/o even thinking, folks in my family forwarded those details on Whatsapp.

PAN Card - Tax identification Aadhaar - “Universal” identifier. Needed for pretty much anything. Including, apparently, buying jewellery.

AFAIK you're only required to give these details when your total bill exceeds a certain amount (~50,000?) and it's largely because buying gold/jewelry is a vector of money laundering and tax avoidance. I don't buy jewelry but ran into this recently when my mother wanted some.

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#112
post #79
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> India has a huge problem with spam / robo callers That's everywhere, not just India.

You’re playing coy, India is a source of a huge number of the worlds phone scams. With Brazil being the “most spammed.” As a slightly related caveat, with how frustrating the scammers are for me in the Us I can only imagine Brazil. Their phones must ring 24/7.

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are being sarcastic. Being poor doesn’t mean people don’t deserve privacy. In fact it can enable for more business opportunities. Government doesn’t operate in series on an issue one by one. This is why you have so many ministries in the govt. Just because roads don’t exist doesn’t mean govt should stop building railways and only think of roads.

That's not the point though. Govt can sure enact/enforce tough laws. But poor people just don't care; for a few bucks they will happily part with their IDs and PII info. When demonetisation happened most of the ill-gotten currency made its way to the banking system through poor people's bank account. In other words, privacy is a luxury that poor people can ill afford. Do poor deserve privacy? Absolutely. But it doesn…

makes sense, thanks for clarifying. I misunderstood GPs comment

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#114
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are being sarcastic. Being poor doesn’t mean people don’t deserve privacy. In fact it can enable for more business opportunities. Government doesn’t operate in series on an issue one by one. This is why you have so many ministries in the govt. Just because roads don’t exist doesn’t mean govt should stop building railways and only think of roads.

I believe that the point the sarcasm meant to address was that poorer people cannot afford to push back and prioritize their privacy the way that folks with more privilege can.

got it, I misunderstood GPs comment

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#115
post #4

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…

"When you install the app they steal your contact list and populate their database that way." 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... https://github.com/sultanhamer/opencontacts

Correction:

https://github.com/sultanahamer/opencontacts

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#116
Many in the comment section told that they are using TrueCaller to avoid spam/robot calls.

In my personal experience, I found that not creating a TrueCaller account itself avoids having spam calls. I tried this by getting a new number years ago. I do get some spams, but from some services that I am using/has used a few months ago, and they want me to get back in (looking at you, ACT fibernet).

Anyway, it's okay to not use such an app for blocking contacts, most modern smartphones has blocking functionality, and some Free/Libre apps has ways to block a number range and works offline without ads. They are more than sufficient for most of us, use them instead.

But as the article said, not having proper legislation is the root cause of this problem, from how many services running in India can you delete your account (not unsubscribe/delete app, but delete “account” with personal information) from? Yeah, think about it.

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are you sure? This page [1] says this is not the case [1] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...

No, they're still uploading the same data as they did before (last I looked into it, it was still enough data to rather easily reverse and get pretty good accuracy. if it wasn't accurate, it would have unacceptably many false-positives, so it's a necessary quality of the system).

Regardless of how you hash them, it needs to work on a phone, and it needs to be reasonably unique... so you can just enumerate literally every phone number ever on a decent computer in a few seconds and, if combined with basically any other information at all (like an area code), that's enough to figure out many or most contacts trivially.

The difference, which that article goes into, is that now they're going all-in on you also trusting Intel's SGX and thus every single thing in between you, them, their hardware delivery pipelines, etc. Which makes collecting that data completely ok (it's done securely now thanks to SGX!), because you should obviously trust Intel because CPU vendors have had such a fantastic track record in their on-chip security systems. ( in case that wasn't clear)

There's a lot to like about Signal's privacy, both in isolation and in comparison to other messengers. They're doing great work. But I have absolutely no idea why they persist in this data collection. Their bull-headedness on zero options around it for years on end smells more suspicious than anything else at this point tbh. About 3/4 of the people I've known who installed Signal immediately left forever because someone they knew contacted them to say "welcome" and they got super creeped out wondering how they knew they had joined. And then the contact-er frequently left too because they had no idea it wasn't consensual, and were creeped out as well.

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see how popular dual sim phones are 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 exp…

Coincidentally, the US is also down to 3 mobile networks. I wonder what the percentiles is for number of networks in populous and large countries. Perhaps 3 networks is the number of maximum economically viable long term networks due to the enormously high cost of installing all the fiber and cell station infrastructure across the country.

Don't forget the carrier locking in the US, and the "Verizon phones" / "global phones" vs "ATT phones" with different LTE bands.

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#119
post #4

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…

It doesn't matter that you have 0 contacts. They will still be able to map you through other people's contact list.

Re: TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India

#120
post #80
post #44

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.

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