--- layout: default title: "You're on Sale: Apps Can Give Personal Information to Strangers" description: "A New Indian Express report examining how mobile applications access personal data, monetise user information, and operate amid weak privacy safeguards in India." categories: [Media mentions] date: 2016-08-08 authors: "Mebin John" source: "The New Indian Express" permalink: /media/apps-personal-information-strangers-new-indian-express/ created: 2026-01-31 --- **You're on Sale: Apps Can Give Personal Information to Strangers** is a *The New Indian Express* article by Mebin John published on 8 August 2016. The report investigates how mobile applications access personal data, the commercial trade in user databases, and the regulatory gaps that enable privacy violations in India's app ecosystem. ## Contents 1. [Article Details](#article-details) 2. [Full Text](#full-text) 3. [Context and Background](#context-and-background) 4. [External Link](#external-link) ## Article Details
📰 Published in:
The New Indian Express
📅 Date:
8 August 2016
👤 Author:
Mebin John
📄 Type:
News Report
📰 Newspaper Link:
Read Online
## Full Text

BENGALURU: We love our apps. A study done last year, found that app usage in India has grown 131 per cent. But apps are notorious for accessing personal data and we're obligingly careless with our privacy. Inadvertently, users give away third-parties access to their phone calls and right to operate cameras on their mobiles.

Therefore, they can listen in to conversations and click photos as and when it pleases them.

"The detailed privacy policy of most of these apps run into pages and people rarely read through them," says Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of The Centre for Internet and Society. "The policy is also loaded with tech jargon, which is lost on the general public."

A study, done in June this year by Norton, reveals that one in two Indians have permitted access to their contacts and mobile data in exchange for free applications. Forty per cent have allowed access to their camera and browsing history, and 50 per cent given permission to send promotional text/emails.

A mobile application developer in Bengaluru, who wishes to remain anonymous, says, "App developers collect personal information of individuals and make a massive database. They then sell this data base to marketing agencies." A database of 5 crore people pays `5,000 and this is sold over and over again.

Many application developers claim that they make large databases with the help of applications. "I have a database with email IDs of 2.5 lakh people," says another app developer of the data he mined from one app.

Chief Technology Officer at T.I.G.E.R Innovations and Publicize Bengaluru, Geo Joy, says: "It is true that we can track an individual's personal conversations and activities using mobile applications. I've heard that many applications scoop details from phone conversations for marketing purposes."

"If you are not paying for anything, then you are the product," Abraham puts it succinctly.

According to him, with access to your conversations or GPS, a third party could monitor your activities. It can get more specific: with data from GPS, accelerometer and gyroscope, a developer can read your driving pattern.

Laws here are easy on developers too. Elonnai Hickok, a researcher from CIS, says, "Apart from Section 43A of the Information Technology Act, we don't have any strict laws or enforcement agencies to monitor these applications that breach the privacy of an individual."

In India, since we don't have a statutory body to monitor applications and their privacy violations, experts suggest individuals exercise caution.

CTO Joy suggests upgrading your operating systems. "Latest versions of all operating systems will warn you when an external medium tries to track your information," he says. "So people who use the older versions should switch to the latest one or upgrade the software."

CE picks five permissions and how they could be misused.

{% include back-to-top.html %} ## Context and Background This article appeared during a period of rapid smartphone adoption in India, when app usage was expanding significantly but regulatory frameworks for data protection remained underdeveloped. The report documented practices that would later become central to global privacy debates, including opaque consent mechanisms, excessive permission requests, and the commodification of user data. Anonymous application developers interviewed for the piece acknowledged creating and selling user databases to marketing agencies, revealing a parallel economy built on personal information extracted through mobile applications. One developer claimed to possess email addresses for 250,000 individuals harvested from a single app, whilst another described databases of 50 million people being sold repeatedly for nominal sums. Sunil Abraham from the Centre for Internet and Society highlighted the asymmetry between lengthy, jargon-laden privacy policies and users' limited capacity to comprehend them. Elonnai Hickok, also from CIS, noted that beyond Section 43A of the Information Technology Act, India lacked dedicated enforcement mechanisms for app-based privacy violations. The Norton study cited in the report indicated widespread permission grants by Indian users, with half allowing access to contacts and mobile data, and 40 per cent permitting camera and browsing history access. The article's publication predated India's 2017 Puttaswamy judgement establishing privacy as a fundamental right, and later legislative efforts to strengthen data protection frameworks. ## External Link - [Read on The New Indian Express](https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/bengaluru/2016/Aug/08/apps-can-give-personal-information-to-strangers-1506752.html)