As we are cruising our lives aboard numerous technological boons, we are often unaware of them breaking into our data & publishing our privacy in the public domain. One such revelation happened to me & my friends on Saturday afternoon after we realized the unscrupulous means of one such application.
There is an android application called as TrueCaller which works world over. As you enter a phone no. into it, land line or mobile, it provides you the name of the owner and the area in which the mobile is registered. The alarming fact is where it gets this information from. As I entered my current no., it displayed it with my facebook username – thus, the app steals information from facebook. As we kept on trying, we discovered that it even steals the information from people’s mobile phones. The nicknames, the residing areas, the job profiles etc. appended with the contact names kept coming. It seems reasonable to assume that as you install this app into your android enabled smartphone, you are tricked into being un-smart yourself. This application takes the data from your mobile phone, the name & other details from your contact list, and saves it onto its servers. As somebody searches for any particular no., it checks in its database and provides information it has recovered from the mobile. This will often include personal names, nicknames, affiliations, addresses (area) attached to the number in any mobile.
As you run this app, a string also runs on the top indicating the total no. of numbers available, or rather stolen, worldwide for search on its servers which kept on increasing at a rate of more than a no. per second. The total numbers standing at a whopping 76 crores till Saturday afternoon. What is more threatening is the possibility of using this information for numerous other gains.
I have never used android phone and was definitely furious of my name & other personal details floating publicly. As my friend cared for the privacy of his friends and colleagues, he deleted the app instantaneously.
All the able individuals are requested to make use of this information in their capacities.
Moreover, the question remains, is technology a boon or a bane, or shall I rephrase as, which technology is a boon and which one a bane???
