Summary

Wouldn’t it be useful to have an app that identifies unrecognised numbers for you? TrueCaller works quite well for this, and they have an Android and iOS version. There are some fairly legitimate privacy concerns around using their app though. Google “Truecaller reddit” and you’ll see what I mean.. but their app works scarily well.

It’d be great if there was an alternative without such privacy concerns, but I’ve yet to find one!

TrueCaller – Identify Unrecognised Numbers

You know those times you receive a phone call from 12345678 and you just want to know who it is? It’d be nice if it would come up as “Commonwealth Bank”.

There’s an app for that.

TrueCaller – and it’s scarily accurate.

I used it for a while, until I started reading about some of the privacy concerns of the app.

See this reddit post. The two most important comments are:

• Legit_PC: The Indian Intelligence Bureau has warned that the Chinese government has been collecting data through TrueCaller, https://androidblacklist.org/2017/12/01/multiple-apps-spying-on-you-privacy-concern/
• 13enito: The problem is, TrueCaller’s actual product is the best of it’s kind (comparing it to other free caller ID’s). Nothing can compare. Therefore, you either give in to not trusting TrueCaller’s company and the notifications (which you can disable), or you go for something cleaner, but settle on the actual product.

The concerns make sense. I don’t have enough technical knowledge to fully understand how the app works, or exactly what the privacy concerns are, but there’s clearly something to be concerned about. My understanding is they are suspected to upload your contact’s information to a server, which is what allows them to have such an accurate database of numbers. You can even try it out with your own number on their website (but you need to sign in)!

In any case, I used it for a while and can testify for its accuracy. I would estimate it is 85% accurate. It even works overseas! I have yet to find an alternative that works as well, but I’ve really only tried using “Should I Answer?“, but it hasn’t worked anywhere as well.

TrueCaller saves you having to:

• Call back to find out who’s called you, as it’ll show you “Commonwealth Bank” instead of “12345678”
• Listen to your voice messages to find out who’s called
• Save these numbers as contacts on your own phone
• Google search numbers
• Waste time actually answering, if it successfully identifies the number as “time wasting call” (at your discretion, of course)

Just to be clear, TrueCaller does not “unhide” private number calls – it is simply an app that attaches a “name” (individual/business) to phone numbers that would otherwise just come up as a series of digits.

It would be nice to have an alterntaive that doesn’t have these privacy concerns, but for what it’s worth, it works pretty well…

Do you have any alternatives to TrueCaller, without the privacy concerns? Experiences with TrueCaller to share? Comment below.