Truecaller is under the scanner, as this time it has been accused of leaking private information of over 7 million Nigerian users. Following several complaints alleging potential breach of privacy rights of users, the Swedish caller ID application is facing an investigation from Nigerian IT regulatory body National Information Technology Agency (NITDA).
In a statement released on September 23, NITDA urged the users to delist from the application and refrain from using it.
Initial investigations have found out that Truecaller does not comply with the global laws on data protection and also fails to comply with the country’s Nigeria Data Protection Regulations (NDPR). According to the investment, Truecaller reroutes all the customer data through Truecaller India and its privacy policy agreement violates the user data privacy regulations.
There is also no well-defined way of knowing how Truecaller is sharing the data with third parties and updating it without specific consent, posing as a serious security risk.
The Director-General of NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa was quoted saying: “The implications of these (leaks) are far-reaching and the provisions of the privacy policy can be exploited to put many citizens in unsavoury conditions.”
This is not the first data security breach for Truecaller this year. It had faced flaks for automatically registering its users to UPI platform without consent in August.
Taking cognisance of the matter, the National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI) had barred the company from adding new users on its UPI platform.
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