Yesterday, Sweden-based global phone directory service TrueCaller‘s database was hacked by Syrian Electronic Army hackers compromising on millions of phone book records available in their database. I can understand the need for something like TrueCaller: it makes it easy for me to identify who is calling, and this is useful if you get a lot of cold-calls. I also recently lost a large number of contacts in a phone-change-mishap, and it is embarrassing if someone I know well calls and I don't know who it is: at an interpersonal level, not having an acquaintances number on your phone is as awkward as turning down a friend request on Facebook: it's half an insult, and maybe this is a situation that Indian's are very conscious of, because Truecaller's largest user base was Indian. As on June 2012, 1.6 million of around 3.2 million of its users in June 2012 were Indian, and now that it has around 20 million users, one can imagine that a substantive number of Indians would be using the service, and tens of millions of users are a part of its database. What is also quite worrying is that Truecaller had access codes to Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and LinkedIn accounts of its users, data that was pulled via the mobile. Truecaller's hacking raises some questions about the apps ecosystem and user behavior: What Apps Access: While it appears that only access codes for social networks were stored within Truecaller, it does make me conscious about the kind of…
