WASHINGTON: The recent allegations for receiving personal data from the official mobile app of Prime Minister Narendra Modi without obtaining proper consent of app users has been denied by the US-based analytics company and clarified that they do not sell, rent or re-market any kind of data.
“CleverTap employees don’t have access to any of the data stored with it by a publisher,” Anand Jain, co-founder of California-based firm, told in an interview in a short e-mail statement when asked if his company has access to users’ personal information from the NaMo App.
The US based startup founded by three Indians is facing severe allegations after a pseudonymous researcher alleged that PM Modi’s app was sourcing private information like name, email, mobile number, device information and location, to servers controlled by the firm in another location without the users’ consent.
The researcher, who goes by the pseudonym account Elliot Alderson, in a series of posts over twitter, pointed out the privacy lapses in the NaMO App and put up allegation that the mobile marketing platform CleverTap was the real beneficiary of the data being transferred.
“When you create a profile in the official @narendramodi #Android app, all your device info (OS, network type, Carrier ) and personal data (email, photo, gender, name, ) are send without your consent to a third-party domain called http://in.wzrkt.com,” the researcher tweeted.
The BJP countered the allegations by saying that the permissions required are all contextual and cause-specific and that the data is being used for only analytics purpose using third party service.
In a blog post yesterday, Mr Jain without making any specific reference of the NaMo App, said, “Given the recent discussion over privacy, security, and the role of service providers such as CleverTap, we’d like to clarify our stand on security, user consent, and data privacy……CleverTap doesn’t sell, share, rent, re-market, or do anything funny with publisher data.”
He further said that the company gives services only for the first-party data which is provided by the app publisher.
“The data collected by the publisher and shared with a service provider is governed by the publisher’s privacy policy. We neither control how publishers frame their privacy policies nor review them.”
“We don’t enhance or combine data from other sources at our end,” said Mr Jain, adding that CleverTap is the brand name, while WizRocket is the name of the parent company.
“CleverTap offers a variety of hosting locations globally, including Indian data-centers for those businesses that might have a legal or governance requirement. CleverTap hosts its servers within AWS, wrote Mr Jain. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services.
As per the claims made by CleverTap, Amazon Web Services is hosting the data at present. The company is a credible one which complies with different certifications which allow finance, healthcare and government data to be stored in their data centers.
Mr Jain described his company to be an app/web analytics and user marketing platform which also provides a dashboard to its customers to be able to view business metrics related to the use of their app/website and communicate with the end users using emails, SMS, push notifications, etc.
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