CCI rejects plea against Google for allegedly giving Truecaller exclusive access to user data

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has turned down a complaint against Google India, for allegedly granting exclusive access to Truecaller to share private contact information of users with everyone while prohibiting other apps from doing so.

"By doing this, Google is favouring Truecaller and distorting the market for caller ID and spam protection apps, thereby providing a monopoly space to Truecaller," Rachna Khaira had claimed in the complaint.

Rejecting the allegations in an order dated June 24, the antitrust regulator said Khaira’s claims remained "unsubstantiated" even though she was given “sufficient opportunity” to offer credible evidence to back the claims.


Khaira wanted the CCI to compel Google to enforce its policy for all applications uniformly and ban Truecaller from making private contact information public. She also sought "significant penalties on Google for creating and allowing a monopoly on caller ID applications”.

Google’s submission
On its part, Google told the regulator that the allegations were “incorrect, as the Google Play Store explicitly prohibits the unauthorised publishing or disclosure of users’ non-public contacts”.

“The informant (Khaira) provides no evidence that Truecaller’s app distributed on the Play Store violates Google’s Play Store policies,” it argued.

The Informant, Google said, “misrepresents and selectively quotes” Truecaller’s privacy policies to claim the caller identification app collects contact information of users without their consent in violation of Google’s Play Store policies. In fact, Truecaller’s privacy policies require user authorisation for access to their contact information through the Google Play Store app, it stressed.

Google asserted that the informant cites “no evidence of discriminatory treatment and fails to identify any specific apps that have been injured through stricter enforcement of Google’s Play Store policies”.

It denied having extended any privileged or unique Android API (application programming interface) access to Truecaller. It also stressed that its commercial relationship with Truecaller through Google cloud computing services and ad services doesn’t contain any exclusivity provisions or any contingency clauses relating to the sharing of non-public contacts.

Regulator’s view
Taking into account the submissions by the informant and Google, the regulator said users seem to have “voluntarily” provided the contact details data to Truecaller.

“Therefore, the allegations of the informant that Truecaller is engaging in ‘unauthorised publishing’ or that Google has allowed any preferential access to Truecaller do not appear to be substantiated,” it said in the order.