Truecaller for Windows Phone and Symbian/S40

Lindsey from TrueCaller got in touch with us last week to let us know about TrueCaller. What TrueCaller does is creates a “collaborative phonebook” pooled together from its users across the various platforms.

Truecaller gives you complete access to number lookups all over the world! Next time you get a missed call from a unknown number, just copy and past that number into Truecaller before calling back to receive accurate information about that phone number not available anywhere else!

It is a pretty interesting concept, and I must admit I do like the idea. However, the biggest issue with this is privacy. What the app does, is collects information from you and your contacts to enhance the information. Sure, you need to accept to share, but does that also mean you agree to share the info of your friends? Lindsey helped us out a bit with the answer to that.

Crowdsourcing is a very popular tool and we are seeing it everywhere in old and new apps and websites.

Great things are built in collaboration. The sharing of phonebooks is an optional feature, and we make that obvious for our users (except Android cannot share their phonebook). We take our user’s privacy very seriously, because at the end of the day, it is all about the user. If anyone wants to unlist from our directory, we do make it easy for anyone to opt-out permanently.

But having the feature is a way for users to choose to be part of building something together (no matter what country they are from). In return, we help them to know who is calling, whether it be a long lost friend, a colleague, a job opportunity, a friend of a friend, etc.

Also, when using Truecaller, you cannot find someone’s phone number without either (A) having it already in your possession from another source or (B) Asking permission through our contact request system via name search (for iPhone and Android users). So people/users are actually more aware of who is trying to get hold of their number with Truecaller, which is a great service for anyone who owns a mobile phone.

This ensures that even if a person is not using Truecaller, but may be in our directory, they will get notified if someone is trying to request their phone number. They will get an SMS saying something like this: “So-and-so (xxx-xxx-xxxx) wants to contact you. Accept or deny the request at http://truecaller.com/xyx. /Truecaller”

We feel and know from many wonderful stories of how Truecaller has ‘saved the day,’ that our users and potential users are in need of a global phone directory, and it will be a future tool that the world can enjoy together.”

Category: Applications, Lumia, S40 Apps, Symbian Apps, Symbian^3, Windows Phone