South Africa’s Data Protection Authority has received a complaint alleging that Truecaller has breached “several provisions” of the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia). The report said the caller ID and spam blocking app may face regulatory restrictions on its activities.
Data Protection Authority spokesperson Nomzamo Zondi confirmed receipt of the complaint, saying it was being processed and would take necessary action.
“We are within the time limit to process the complaint and assign it to an investigator who will then engage further with the complainant and the responsible party against whom the complaint was lodged. Therefore, we cannot answer any other questions at this time,” Zondi said.
Truecaller has not yet made a statement on the matter, and regulators have not made public the names of the accusers. Truecaller is a Swedish company founded in Stockholm in 2009 by Nami Zarringhalam and Alan Mamedi. The app was born when the co-founders were still students and wanted to create a service that would make it easier to identify incoming calls from unknown numbers.
Truecaller activities include using user-provided data to identify callers and block spam calls and messages. After downloading the app, users provide their name and phone number to the platform during registration. This allows other Truecaller users to identify the user when they call. Truecaller’s actions are not an invasion of privacy, since users have consented to their data being used in this way.
Meanwhile, caller ID and spam blocking apps could face regulatory issues, as once a user consents to the app downloading their phone’s address book, that address book automatically becomes part of the company’s database.This means that mobile users who don’t use Truecaller can have personal information within the app, since a third party (the user) is doing the uploading, and their names and phone numbers are verified.
Regulators may require Truecaller to notify people who have been added to its database through a third party.
If the app’s claims of Popia violations are valid, data protection authorities may face a dilemma: on the one hand they have to face the challenge of complying with data protection law, or on the other hand they have to dismiss the complaint and give users the opportunity to fight spam calls through their use of the app.
Caller ID and spam blocking apps, with around 425 million users worldwide, have proven to be one of the most effective spam detection and rejection methods available to users to reduce the influx of unidentified calls.
