True Caller app is designed for smartphone users to identify callers. It is incredible that it features a whole of people. In as much as the app can boast of a lot of people the designers have come out to state that the app will not function correctly if not for people you and me. We help them update the numbers and names they have on the platform.
As such it is a virtual address book that helps display the user’s name even if you do not have the number on your phone. It has helped solve the problem of getting unknown numbers to call you when you do not know who it is. Prior to installing the true caller app, I usually listen to the voice of callers and try to id the voice. The true caller app runs across the Android, iOS, Windows and Symbian platforms thus leaving no one out.
Before installing the app you might want to know more.
True Caller Features
The most obvious is that True Caller is a super-powerful caller ID app. It helps users identify who is calling. It tells you who and where of the callers.
More than identifying unknown callers, True Caller can also block them. You can also get informed of spam callers in your region and surrounding. Get to blacklist contacts to increase the list of an already existing spam list. Callers on the spam list will get a busy tone on their end and you won’t even notice when they call.
Get to search for any name or number to know the user. All you need to do is enter a number and know the owner of the number and possibly a profile picture. It may not be accurate in certain cases, but it is in most cases. In fact, the more users there are in a certain region, the more accurate the app is in matching names to numbers and vice versa.
It is important here to underline the name to number rendering feature which is quite new and revolutionary. Type a name and the app returns several matches that bring you to getting contact information or any person or organization. You can copy a name or a number from anywhere and TruCaller will find a match for it.
It works like a phone directory, but with much more power. It actually gives you what the phone directory will not. This has brought up privacy concerns, which we discuss further below.
True Caller Cons
True Caller has shown to be inaccurate in certain cases, but it is overwhelmingly accurate. Moreover, the app is still driven by advertisement. Though it features ads, these are quite discreet and not intrusive.
The biggest downside of the app and the service is the question of privacy, security, and intrusion. Right from the start, especially when you learn how it works and when you go through the installation process, there is something intimidating and freaky about it. If privacy is not a big issue for you and you don’t mind your links going public, you will enjoy the call blocking and effective name-number matching the app offers. But if you mind your privacy and that of others, read below.
True Caller App Privacy Concerns
Many people using the app have searched their own names and numbers and got surprises. Many found their numbers with strange nicknames besides theirs’ and pictures of themselves they never knew existed. This is as a result of what other people saved your number with. Just a peek of how people don’t like you. I wornt want to let you know what I saved my boss’s name as.
How it Works: During installation, the app prompts users for permission ( prior to using the app) to access your phone book. These permissions account for the huge database on its server. Thus collecting information you have on your contact list most of all the name you saved the contacts with. That is why it is a crowdsourcing app. Hence the contact you see them display is actually accrued from all True Caller users’ phones. They go further to use a form of artificial intelligence via crawlers and predictive technology to match names and numbers.
True Caller claims that the contacts they take are unsearchable by users, which is seemingly true. But while people out there cannot search these contacts on your phone, they can search the same data in another form on their directory. So, by using True Caller and agreeing to their terms and conditions, you are giving away the privacy of all the contacts in your phone’s contact list.
Besides, this is how you often end up getting inaccurate and obsolete data about a person or a number. This is because data is extracted from people’s address books, which are often not up to date. But the greater concern here is that your contact information is available up there for anyone to search.
Now, at a time when giant apps like WhatsApp are getting dead-serious about user privacy with features like end-to-end encryption, are we prepared to allow such privacy issues go unchecked on our phones and even contribute to it? For many people, this is a non-issue, especially given the power the True Caller app comes with. Think of how naively people give away many aspects of their private lives on Facebook for the world to see. On the other end, privacy hardliners will have a no-no for this app. For yet others, it is just a trade-off between getting a very effective look-up directory and call-blocking at the price of some privacy.
Whether or not you use the app, your name and contact information are in True Caller’s directory, among billions of others. This without your permission. Maybe so for all contacts in your contact list. The good news is that you can enlist your name from the directory.
Unlisting Your Name From True Caller Directory
When unlisting yourself from the directory, you are actually preventing people from seeing your name, number and profile information when searching the True Caller directory. You can do so by quickly filling the form on the Unlist Phone Number page. Note that unlisting your number also requires you to stop using the app and deactivating your account. You need to completely move out of the system.
Even if you are not using the app and have unlisted your number from the directory, you can still use it online through their main page. But there, you can only enter number, not names.
Once you unlist, your number will be absent from the search results within 24 hours. But will it be completely erased? Where has it been shared with? We don’t know.
Bottom Line
Finally, you can subscribe to any of these two philosophies. Since your contact information is already up there since long before you knew without you having had anything to say about it, it is only fair to take advantage of the system as payback and bring some power to your smartphone, benefitting from name and number lookup, caller identification and call blocking. On the other hand, you may want to shun the system altogether and unlist your number from it.
