Truecaller is the go-to mobile directory for hundreds of millions of users across the universe. It is a pretty helpful app for users who daily deal with spam calls. In a country such as India, where spam calls are rampant, it is a godsend service. However, there’s a pressing concern for privacy with the Truecaller app.
Let me put it straight, Truecaller is perfect at what it does, but the service harvests too much data via contacts, call logs, & messages. If you’re comfortable with this and see its service value, you should keep using it. However, if you’re concerned about their privacy and wish to remove their number & other contact information from Truecaller’s database, this is the article for you. This article will help you how you can quickly delete your Truecaller account and remove your number from its database.
Delete your Truecaller Account
1. Firstly, open the Truecaller app on your smartphone & navigate to Settings. At the bottom, you’ll find the Privacy Center; click on it.
2. After that, tap on Deactivate. It’ll ask for a re-confirmation; press Yes.
Important: Your Truecaller account is now deactivated, but users can still search your number and find info about you. So you are required to do one more step: unlist your mobile number from Truecaller’s database. To do that, follow the next given step.
3. Open Truecaller’s unlisting page on a web browser and choose your country. Afterward, enter your phone number with the country code & validate the captcha. Finally, tap on “Unlist Phone Number,” and you’re done.
Remember that it probably takes 24 hours to remove your phone number altogether.
Stop Spam Calls & Messages without Sacrificing Privacy
Well, now you’ve deleted Truecaller and made your number private. However, you have even made yourself prone to spam calls. So, if you want to stop spam calls & messages without sacrificing your privacy, you can do that to some extent. Most of the Android phones come builtin with Google’s Phone app, which has native support for filtering spam calls. You can use this to filter the most prominent spam calls. It will not be as good as Truecaller’s spam filtering, but it’ll stop most spam calls.
1. To activate spam call filtering, click on the 3-dot menu in the upper right corner and open Settings.
2. Here, open Caller ID & Spam and enable “Caller ID & spam” and “Filter spam calls” options. You’re done.
You can try out the SMS Organizer app (Free) for text messages, which automatically puts all the spam messages under a separate section. To make things even better, you will not be notified if you receive any spam messages. Additionally, the messages are stored locally on your device and aren’t shared with any server.
There’s no proper alternative that works as good as Truecaller without hampering your privacy to identify unknown numbers. You can create a second user on your Android device with no access to contacts & messages. You can use Truecaller’s service to identify unknown numbers without giving your data or info in the second space. And if you like to see how that’s done, let me know, and I will help you out.
Delete Truecaller and Enjoy your Privacy
It was our take on Truecaller’s privacy nightmare and how you can completely delete your phone number from Truecaller’s database. You can try out alternative ways to have a more privacy-friendly experience. Google is even making Android pretty strict in terms of sharing user data with apps & services.
It would be helpful if you always kept your smartphone updated with the newest version of Android. Anyway, if you liked the post or have any questions for us, you can let us know in the comments section below.
