SHAKY CALL

TRUECALLER,S OVER-DEPENDENCE ON INDIA MIGHT COME BACK TO BITE IT, ESPECIALLY WITH INCREASED SCRUTINY OF ITS DATA GATHERING PRACTICES AMID INDIA,S UPCOMING DATA PROTECTION LAW

- PRERNA LIDHOO

MY FIRST CONVERSATION with Alan Mamedi, the 38-year-old CEO and Co-founder of Stockholm-based caller ID and spam detection app Truecaller happened to be on the micro-blogging site Twitter in January 2020, when I had tweeted, “Life would be better if Truecaller starts telling us WHY the person is calling.” “Noted!” Mamedi had replied then. Merely nine months later, Truecaller was live with its new feature, Call Reason, a new way to tell people why you’re calling.

User feedback like this is essential for Mamedi, who believes in an open and liberal feedback mechanism. Starting out as a Kurdish refugee in northern Sweden, he co-founded Truecaller with his friend Nami Zarringhalam in 2009, which now counts India as its biggest market with nearly 77 per cent of its user base, or 235.5 million active users, located here. Moreover, its data says that a typical Indian phone user receives about 17 spam calls a month on average, as compared to the highest-spammed country Brazil, where users receive around 33 spam calls per month on average. It further says that globally, it has identified and blocked 37.8 billion spam calls in 2021.