How Truecaller App Works [2018 Updated]

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 smartphones. 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 smartphone. 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 log in 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 someone searches the number using Truecaller number search, the caller is associated with that number will be displayed.

Truecaller App

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.

TrueCaller connects to white and yellow pages all over the world which means if there is public data available in your country, we’ll try to access it and share that data with you. However, in most countries of the world, this data isn’t publicly available and it is definitely not free. So in order to access and distribute this data, we decided to crowd-source the information. Therefore when you start TrueCaller you will get the possibility to share your phone book, and in return, you will get access to search other users’ shared phonebooks. But in order to protect our users and their data, we have also made it so that you can only search the crowd-sourced data by already having the number and then getting access to the name. This means the phone number is effectively turned into the key needed to open the vault for information associated to that number

Where Does Truecaller Get its Data from

Suppose there are only 3 people on the entire Earth:

Person A – Installs Truecaller

Person B – Installs Truecaller

Person C  – Installs Truecaller

In return, Truecaller took all the numbers and names saved on the devices of Person A, Person B, and Person C. Truecaller got all the data.

Now, when Person A called Person B; he will know the number and name because Truecaller already got all the information.

But now it’s changed a little bit because of a leak of information from users.

So now it asks directly to users to give or verify the information provided by the other users or provided by the user himself