Indian Army Bans Use Of 89 Popular Apps Among Personnel

By FnF Correspondent | PUBLISHED: 09, Jul 2020, 19:48 pm IST | UPDATED: 09, Jul 2020, 19:48 pm IST

Delhi: The Indian Army has asked its personnel to delete 89 apps. It goes beyond the list of 59 Chinese apps banned by the Indian government recently.

The list of prohibited apps by the Indian Army not just includes Chinese ones like TikTok but also other popular social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Zoom and Reddit.

The list also includes the Swedish caller identification app Truecaller which has openly expressed its disappointment over the communique by terming the decision "unfair" and "unjust".

The Indian Army has cited national security concerns as the reason behind this decision.

It is disappointing and saddening to learn that Truecaller is among the list of 89 apps being banned by the Indian Armed Forces for their personnel. Truecaller is an app of Swedish origin that considers India its home," a Truecaller spokesperson said in a statement.

Truecaller has its headquarter in Stockholm and its services include identification of caller, spam detection, messaging and more.

"We would like to reiterate that Truecaller remains safe to use, both for our citizens and for our esteemed armed forces personnel. We see no reason for Truecaller to be on this list and will investigate the matter further," added the statement.

"Truecaller provides a vital service for over 170 million people in India, identifying and blocking hundreds of millions of spam calls and SMS every single day," the company stated.

Calling its inclusion in the list "unfair" and "unjust", Truecaller added that it stores users' data in India and all app features are permission-based and disabled by default.

Moreover, it emphasised that a majority of Truecaller employees globally are Indians and claimed that it does not upload phonebooks or sell users' data.

In 2019, in a data security nightmare, a so-called bug automatically created thousands of Truecaller users' Unified Payments Interface (UPI) accounts with ICICI Bank without their prior consent or knowledge. Panic and hacking fears gripped as users received notifications of their UPI account being created when they had not initiated such a process.

The company later apologized to its users who were affected by the bug.