Truecaller reads your SMSes to determine if you need loan
Swedish caller-ID giant Truecaller is facing major privacy-related debacles one after the other. The company was recently criticized for signing users up for its payments service, without consent. And now, in another weird case, it has been accused of going through users' SMS Inboxes for determining if they need a loan. Here's all about the strange practice.
Software developer spotted signs of SMS tracking
Just recently, a software developer by the name of Nemo took to Twitter to report that Truecaller uses third-party software development kits (SDKs) to go through the SMS inboxes of its users. The developer alleged that the tool scans incoming messages for specific terms and uses them to build dedicated loan profiles with an offline credit score for every tracked user.
Apparently, Truecaller goes deep into messages
According to Nemo, Truecaller goes fairly deep into the messages, looking for a total of 365 phrases and words in the SMS Inbox. Now, this not only includes general terms like salary, credit, debit, bounced, premium, insurance or retailer names like Reliance Fresh, Grofers, Uber, IRCTC but also specific phrases like 'Dear Customer, First EMI due on', 'Thank you for your payment'.
This information is used for calculating incomes, expenses
Nemo's revelation indicated that the company uses the information from messages to assess incomes and spending habits of users. Then, it uses the information to assign an offline credit score to the user involved in the process. The practice, which has also been confirmed by MediaNama's Nikhil Pahwa, raises major concerns around the extent of data Truecaller is gathering and its security.
What Truecaller says on the matter
Truecaller refuted the claim, telling Inc42 that it explicitly asks users "who wish to apply for a loan, to give us permission to analyze their transaction messages (only)". It added, the process is completely "consent-based" and separate from general SMS permissions required for Spam detection. Also, all the data the company collects is covered under its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
