Truecaller delivers an experience that goes beyond the limitations
of today’s phonebook apps so that people always have access to the right
information, people and businesses they need. It lets you search for contact
information (based on name or number), identify incoming calls, and block calls
you don’t want to receive – so you never have to leave the service to find the
right contact.
Started five years ago, Truecaller was an idea of two
engineers who aimed to create something new in the world of technology. Today
they stand as a company of 55 international minds coming from different corners
of the world to make a service that stretches every remote place of the world.
Today, many smart phone users are using Truecaller to trace
out a lot of spam calls they get everyday. So, did you ever wonder How
Truecaller actually works? How does it know all the phone numbers and caller
ids?
How does Truecaller app work?
Truecaller acts on a give and take scenario... You want those
unknown numbers then you have to part with your phone book contacts.. Now
apparently everyone who has installed the app has surrendered his phone book.
The data is crowd-sourced from the millions of users who have downloaded the
truecaller app on their smart phones. As part of the end user agreement, the
truecaller app asks the user to allow access to the user's address
book/contacts on the smart phone. This data is then uploaded by the app to the
company's servers. After going through several data matching/refining
algorithms, this data is made available to all truecaller users to search upon.
The story must start from the login screen. If you have
already used Truecaller, you might have seen that Truecaller only allows either
Facebook, Yahoo! or Gmail to access Truecaller app. If you don't have one you
cannot connect to Truecaller database. This is because, Facebook, Gmail and
Yahoo! are the most widely used social networking sites that contain a lot of
phone numbers and other contact details. It implies that when you use one
of the social sites, your entire contacts including phone numbers, contact names,
email ids will be uploaded to a secure Truecaller server. In case you login to
the app using your mobile phones then your entire address book will be sent to
the Truecaller servers. These are organized into records and each number will
be assigned a Truecaller id. When some one searches the number using Truecaller
number search, the caller id associated with that number will be displayed.
So out of all the people who know you and have your contact
number stored against your name in their phones - if even 1 person uses the
truecaller app, your contact number and name would end up in the truecaller
database.
Pros
1. Allows
you to find mobile phone location of the number in phone number search.
2. 'Who
viewed my profile' functionality is also provided by Truecaller
application. You can keep a track on who is viewing your number.
3. You
can find caller from phone number. Similar to reverse phone lookup
4. It
allows you to block such spam numbers and report them to Truecaller database to
mark it as spam so that others may also not suffer from this number
Cons
1. Caller
ID does not work in all areas
2. Truecaller
requires Internet connection for it to work
3. No
guarantee of information security
4. It
infringes on privacy issues.
How to unlist Number from Truecaller
This is an important feature of Truecaller that lets you to
remove your private number from the database. Go to the below link enter phone
number that you wish to unlist from Truecaller, select a reason and fill out
the captcha then select unlist. Done ! your number will never again be uploaded
to the server and previous records associated with your number will be deleted.
http://www.truecaller.com/unlist
