Most likely because it would be a clear GDPR violation if done in Europe. Oh, except you did because the developer you interacted with has a privacy policy explaining that they share information with 'partners.'Īccording to the article though, this is only done for numbers in India. It is free to use on both iPhone and Android. Now TC has your phone number and your app registration (name, email, IP address, browser fingerprint, etc.) and they add that to their database even though you never gave permission to TrueCaller to use that PII. Truecaller is a renowned Caller ID app to block spam calls and identify unknown callers. But now, you can choose to use Truecaller’s Caller ID interface, which will replace your phone’s default caller ID interface.

Not in the database? You have to answer a SMS to get in. When you receive calls, Truecaller appears as a pop-up over your phone’s stock incoming call interface. Is your number in the TC database? Good, you can use the API.

Cool' Now part of the signup for their service requires a phone number. Oh look, TrueCaller will let me do it for free. 'Well shit,' developer says, 'I better put an access control but I don't want to pay for Twilio. That is, 3rd party developer makes an API, opens it and promptly gets swarmed with bots scraping their data. I'm not entirely sure, but it sounds like they offered a SMS verification to app developers who wanted to gate access to their services.

My truecaller id