Although there are wonderful benefits to using smartphones, everyone has encountered the annoyance of spam, telemarketers, and calls from unknown numbers. At best these are minor inconveniences that are the cost of modern communication. At their worst, they can constitute harassment, loss of privacy and even render your phone unusable. Truecaller is an app that can help dramatically when it comes to screening, blocking, and tracking unwanted calls and spam text messages. It’s available on all major platforms, including Android.
If you’ve ever received a call from an unknown number, it’s natural to want to look it up and see if it is a legitimate contact or a telemarketer. Because there are so many numbers out there, it’s impossible to screen them all and it is always possible that you are receiving a legitimate call from an unknown number. It is also far more likely that it’s a telemarketer or wrong number. With Truecaller, you can simply go through your call history and tap a number to instantly search through a database and see relevant information on the number and check its legitimacy. When you receive a call, you can also quickly swipe the number and Truecaller will perform a search on it to see if it’s legitimate or who it is.
As a preemptive measure, you can also search for known local spammers and telemarketers and block them from calling you beforehand. Truecaller hosts an extensive database of known spam and telemarketing numbers both globally and for your local area and they can be set to be automatically blocked. If you do receive a call from such a number, the call notification will instantly show that it is not a trusted contact and even its status as a spammer, telemarketer, etc. You can also contribute to the database by reporting spam numbers.
Truecaller partly works via crowdsourcing contact data from its users so it is not foolproof and there are some privacy concerns. When you first load the app, it can pull contact data from Facebook and your phone and uses this with its own contact list database. The app promises that it does not upload your data so that it’s searchable by others but the fact that it accesses so much contact data could be a concern for some.
Source: TrueCaller On Google Play Store