Truecaller is one of the most popular apps in the world. Its powers are immense letting you know who is calling without them being in your contact list. However, many of you are afraid of the information you have to hand over to Truecaller to get this service and that’s why many of you are unlisting from the service

Unlisting from Truecaller involves two easy steps:

1. Deactivate your account from the Truecaller app by heading over to Settings > About > Deactivate account.
2. Head over to their unlisting page, input your phone number on the search box and click unlist. According to the company, the unlisting process will take 24 hours to complete.

In case you were wondering, these are the security claims from Truecaller

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Truecaller Privacy Breach Policies

Truecaller is one app that requires a lot of data from you. For instance, these are the permissions the app requires from you

• contacts
• calendar information
• location
• microphone use
• call logs
• reading your texts
• checking your Wi-Fi connections, among others

Many other apps are known to request for these permissions but the problem comes in when you find this info online.

For example, Hong Kong leader Leung Chun Ying and Carrie Lam Cheng both use Truecaller on their respective phones. They were surprised to know that their contact details were available on the internet via the application.

Once you download and register with Truecaller, they fetch all your contact data and add it to its database.

So as long as you have saved someone on your phone, that data will be picked and their number updated on the database for all of the worlds to see.

Some would argue, however, that when you want something, you should be ready to give something else. “Truecaller synchronises your address book and it doesn’t let others know that the data was received from you.” Even Truecaller’s privacy statement notes something different but then who can we really trust?

This pales into comparison as to how much information you are handing to them. The fact that the best feature they have is diverting or stopping spam messages is not validation enough. So urrm, be careful out there.