Truecaller’s all (100M Indian users are) dressed up, but with nowhere to go

Poor Truecaller. 

 

I never believed I’d use those two words together, but such is Truecaller’s plight. The 10-year-old Swedish company uses software algorithms and crowdsourced databases from over 140M of its users to "guess” the identity of anyone who calls them. But over the years, they’ve been such flagrant violators of our individual and collective privacy that I think of them as the true anti-vaxxers of digital privacy. Because vaccination in the real world, after a threshold, leads to higher “herd immunity”—those who are immune end up indirectly providing protection to those who aren’t. But with Truecaller, every user who signs up and contributes private data for its databases ends up indirectly compromising the privacy of even those who have never used Truecaller.

 

But today’s story by Arundhati isn’t about Truecaller’s numerous privacy violations, for which a simple DuckDuckGo search would do. Instead, it's about the company’s repeated pivots and search for a profitable business model. A search that’s increasingly getting desperate for a company that has raised close to $100M in venture funding but had only $22M in revenue last year. Oh, and $6M in losses.

 

It is this desperation that may have led to its most glaring privacy violation so far. Last week, many of its Indian Android app users were shocked to received messages from their banks telling them they’d started the process of registering for a UPI payments account. A “bug” in the Truecaller app had accidentally queried the UPI database to figure out which bank accounts the user’s mobile number was linked to, and then accidentally enrol them for a UPI account. 

 

This is where I must reference the wonderful "Zawinski's law of software envelopment” coined by software programmer Jamie Zawinski. It says, "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

 

Because in India, that law must now read, "Every app attempts to expand until it can send UPI payments. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Because digital payments is where every major app in search of a business model or revenues is ending up at. The $100B (yep, billion) Indian digital credit opportunity is the Holy Grail for WhatsApp, Google, PhonePe, Paytm, Amazon and Truecaller.