On Wednesday, the High Court of Bombay issued notices to the Union & Maharashtra Govts, among others, over PIL alleging that the Truecaller mobile application "shared" user data breaching legal norms of the country.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta & Justice G S Kulkarni was hearing a PIL filed by one Shashank Posture.
"The Truecaller app collects data of all users. It shares such data with some of its partners without the consent of users, & dumps the liability on the user," the petitioner told the Court.
Posture alleged, "This is a manipulative set up because the user has no choice. The app also registers users for a Unified Payments Interface service without their consent, or without due process".
When the Court asked who were these partners benefitting from Truecaller, Posture named "Google India, Bharati Airtel, ICICI Bank", & claimed that several loan providing companies were also the beneficiaries of such data leaks by the app.
Posture further said he had impleaded the Union Govt, the Maharashtra Govt, the state IT department, Truecaller international LLP, ICICI Bank, & the National Payment Corporation as respondent parties in the case.
The Govt authorities approved the Truecaller app "without proper checks & in contravention of the information security practices rules", Posture alleged.
The HC said this was a fit case for issuing notices.
The Court said that "The case of the petitioner is that Truecaller through its mobile application has indulged in an absolute breach of data privacy of citizens. He submits that such breach is contrary to data protection laws".
"We have heard the petitioner for some time & we are of the opinion that a notice is required to be issued to respondents," it said, directing the respondent parties to reply to the notice within 3 weeks.
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