Guess who's calling!

Ever wished you  knew who was calling?  It happens to us all the time: we get calls from unrecognized numbers at inconvenient times. But a nagging fear that the caller might be a friend makes us   respond -- only to find it was a nuisance call of some kind... they get through even if we have registered for "Do Not Disturb" or DND.

Now clever people have come up with  some solutions  which  might help. The best known is a free  app from Sweden called TrueCaller.com .  Once installed, the app available for all major mobile operating systems,  claims to tell you the registered name of the caller before you pickup -- no matter whether the call is from another mobile or a landline.  It gives you access to a  list of top spammers, allowing you to quickly block their calls. How does TrueCaller do it?  By trawling  the social media sites, crowd-sourcing information available somewhere  in  Cyber space, which puts a name to a number.

I have installed and tried out True Caller  and it seems to come up right about half the time. The other half , it is unable to  provide a name  and  its location information is  in any case, too wide.  It says the caller is based in India: Big deal!

A few days ago,  an India-based  site, Site2SMS which says it  is India's largest free messaging web portal, provided  a free service:  a link,  where  one could enter any mobile  and track  the subscriber name, his or her location (state) and service provider, as well as the type of service ( GSM/CDMA) and whether DND was in operation.  The site is http://site2sms.com/mobile-number-tracker.

I tried out a dozen numbers -- my own as well as family members'-- and in  some 3 out of 5  tries, I got the full details. It fails to get the name  sometimes but has a better success rate with Indian numbers than TrueCaller.   I have a feeling it  crawls  the Web just like TrueCaller   but because it  looks at more Indian editions of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn where people tend to share  their contacts, it has a better record.

Site2SMJS has also launched a similar  service to track  an IP address. It provides   City, Location, Country & Internet Service Provider information. Do you want to find out someone's IP address ? Or to find out what country an email is from?  The  free service can be accessed here: www.site2sms.com/ip-address-tracker

It is fine to  make use of such services  which help us  filter out  spammers and nuisance callers.  But there is an alarming message in the very fact that services  can so easily  let anyone  know our own name and location. I found that while all my mobile numbers were instantly recognized, those of my aged relatives could not produce their names. That is  because, they don't indulge in social media or  rarely use email.  Mobile number tracking is a useful service. It is also an amber signal of how easily we are giving up our privacy, when we use free tools like email, Facebook, Twitter....