How Truecaller works: Is Truecaller application safe to use in 2021

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By ITH

Truecaller

Many of us whenever get a missed call from an unknown number, try to recall that number, and when we fail to find the true owner of that number, finally most of us go on Truecaller and search for number owner information isn’t it.


Truecaller is used by over 200+ million active users worldwide and they are known to identify the owner of a phone number. 

In this post, we are going to discuss more on the Truecaller and its permission required to run on Android devices and we will also try to go deep into privacy policy to know the actual scenario of its database and its working.

IMP NOTE: Please read the full article till the end of this post to know all scenario otherwise you may end up with misconseption.


About Truecaller :

Truecaller is a Swedish company developed by True Software Scandinavia AB in 2011.

Its main feature is Basically a Caller identification service but by time now it has got many additional features too like blocking spam calls, messenger, SMS blocking, and more such features related to calling.

Simply it is the service that eases the work of finding owner details of any number. 

It is available to download as an application on Android and iOS phones & they also provide their phone number identification service through their official site called truecaller.com.

Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi said that by the end of 2020, Truecaller users had grown from 213 million to 267 million, an increase of nearly 25%. Out of those 200+ million users were from India alone.

Yet, it has millions of users around the world, but many do not know how it actually works. How do they improve their database? Is it really safe to use?

Before explaining Trucaller is safe or not you should know how Truecaller actually works.

How does Truecaller work?

Well, it’s all game of data. There are few sources of data of the truecaller:

  • They manage to collect their data through the partnership with various phone directory providers globally.
  • Every single Sign Up from the application is also saved to records.
  • Truecaller’s community present on the app and website suggest the owner of the phone number which are also recorded.
  • In countries other than the United Kingdom and European Union if you download the Truecaller app from a source other than the Google Play Store or Apple app store then you have the option ‘Enhanced search‘, if you have enabled it then all your contacts will be uploaded and used to improve the database of Truecaller.
  • Enhanced search‘ option is also available while signing in on the official truecaller’s site.

Truecaller enhanced search
All the data collected from these sources is used by Truecaller to process through some algorithms, and finally when someone tries to search for a phone number then these processed owner details are shown to him.

Is Truecaller safe?

In August 2019, for the first time, people were afraid to use the Truecaller app, as a user after updating Trucaller reported a bug that was automatically sending messages to their banks for creating a credit profile. After some days confirmation came itself from the Trucaller team that this bug was there but now we have removed it and the user can use our app securely.

You can read the full article related to this incident on indiatoday.com

Till today, no other bugs have been seen but the privacy policy of Trucaller is updated many times.

Presently whenever a user tries to sign he has to sign in with his Facebook or Gmail account with additionally with the personal number. Nextly have to agree on the privacy policy and Terms and conditions, here we noticed the first issue which we should concern about. 

For further investigation, we opened the privacy policy page of Trucaller and When we carefully read the privacy page you can clearly read Truecaller collects data related to your
geo-location, IP address, the applications you have installed, your outgoing and incoming calls, and such private data.

truecaller%2Bprivacy%2Bpolicy
Truecaller policy

This is shocking that they collect this much private data just for improving user experience! and providing ads that interest you.

This much data is sufficient for hackers to do anything. 

Further, when we read the privacy overview on Trucaller’s official website they have clearly mentioned they don’t sell any information to anyone, which is a really good thing for Trucaller users that data Trucaller doesn’t sell any information to anyone but what if someone hacks and steals the data from Trucaller’s database. Well, further reading on the privacy page under the 5th point gave us the answer to this question. 

Truecaller says we take all safety measures to protect this data and our team is also prepared for all these things.


Some YouTuber’s and websites mentioned points about permissions required to run the Truecaller app so let’s talk about them.

Truecaller app Permissions:

Whenever a user downloads the Truecaller app and tries to sign in he has to give all permissions to:

  1. Make & Manage phone calls
  2. Access phone call logs
  3. Send and view SMS messages
  4. Access your contacts

Truecaller permissions
Truecaller permissions required

Many other sites and YouTuber’s while reviewing Truecaller said when we give permission to ‘access your contacts’ Truecaller upload the contacts from our smartphone to their server and use it to improve their data, which is a complete myth. If it is true so then Google Play Store and Apple App Store won’t give place to stand in their stores at all as an app in these stores can’t access the contacts present in the smartphone. 


Actually, all the permissions are required to give you some basic features like Truecaller dialler, spam numbers, call history, filter spam SMS, etc.

Truecaller data source

Final Conclusion:

Well, we have gone through many points but didn’t found anything against Truecaller’s service and app, which means you can have faith in using Truecaller. Well, Truecaller has very confidential data, where they care about the user experience and they have the responsibility for such valuable data and they care about it.

In this research when we analyzed carefully we found not only Trucaller but also all apps in the market can be unsafe to use. 

In this growing world of technology data is the most valuable thing. Many of our everyday usage apps like the chrome browser, Instagram, Facebook collects our data and use it for their profits.

Finally, we recommend using trusted apps and avoid third-party apps that can risk your safety. so finally, we can say you can trust Truecaller and use it.


References used:

Also read: Fastest best 2 ways to download YouTube videos on Android phone

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