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Comment by wara23arish | Hacker News Reader

Is true caller any different than an automated yellow pages?

If I give you my phone number, and you have True Caller installed and save my number to your contacts, I unknowingly and unconsensually also give my phone number to True Caller and essentially the entire world.

Aren’t yellow pages also adding everybody’s number without consent?

I didn’t grow up with them so I might be wrong.

It was the white pages but yes. That's why there is such a yawning gap between reality, where nobody gives a fuck if you know my phone number, and niche online privacy activism, where for some reason people care a lot.

It's done by your phone company and they're supposed to let you know and allow you to opt-out.

For one, yellow pages was centrally managed by the phone company you were a customer of, and opt-in (you may be thinking of the white pages for residential customers, which was opt-out). Also, the information in the white/yellow pages is curated and just the name provided by the customer. TrueCaller gets every tidbit of information that your contacts decide to use to annotate your number. Many people use more in the description than just your name.

Thanks for the explanation, I didn’t grow up in the west/US so we had no such thing or service. I just remember movies with big yellow books with contact or company information.

I would say most people would use contacts like “Joe Plumber” or “Maria Tinder”.

Truecaller is kind of a substitute for identifying spam calls where I grew up where there is no alternative. Also helps when someone is calling you and you want to avoid answering them.

Most people definitely don’t care that it’s taking all your contact info though the utility of the app is well worth it.

Yellow pages is a flat list. TrueCaller is a contact graph which is very strong proxy for social graph.

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