How many spam messages do you receive? Just going through my SMS archive, I realized that at least 90% of the messages I receive are related to opening of new stores, announcing sales or even scam messages.
We’ve all been victims of scam messages, whether it’s the popular one of someone claiming to be a relative and finding treasures and jewels or someone falsely claiming to have sent you credit by mistake and wanting it back, scam messages have been around for quite a while and many of us have been naive enough to fall victim.
Yesterday, TrueCaller released their latest app, TrueMessenger, with the aim to improve people’s smartphone experiences. With the percentage of smartphone users rapidly increasing globally as well as in the region, millions of users have benefited from TrueCaller in terms of blocking unwanted calls or identifying unknown numbers.
However, messages were still an issue and that’s where TrueMessenger comes in. TrueMessenger helps you identify incoming messages by name as well as block spam messages.
“We, at Truecaller, believe people have a right to know who’s calling. If someone were to knock at your door, you can look through the peephole and see who they are. When you receive an e-mail, you see their name. Funny enough, smartphones are the only communication device where you don’t know who’s contacting you,” TrueCaller’s Vice President of Growth and Partnerships in the Middle East and North Africa Husain Misherghi explained to us.
One of the first things that came to mind when I heard this was that I don’t want anyone going through my personal messages and skimming through the content to see whether I should receive it or not. And do we really want to give an app access into all our personal data, whether it’s full access to our contacts or reading the personal messages we receive?
“There’s a filter that is downloaded with the app and it’s embedded inside the application. We don’t have access to it, we don’t take it to our servers to scan it and then see whether it’s spam or not. This happens inside your phone. We don’t take a copy, it’s just a built-in algorithm that is programmed to detect spam messages according to the intensive research we’ve done for each country,” TrueCaller’s Marketing Manager in the Middle East and North Africa Magdy Shehata further explained.
With Truecaller penetrating 90% of Lebanon’s market and a total of 13 million users in Egypt, 40 million users in the Middle East and over 150 million users worldwide, TrueMessenger was introduced based on user requests and is now available for Android users to be downloaded from the Playstore.
Hand tailoring the application to fit each country and each spam message, the application is programmed to detect new spam messages according to the number of users who mark certain messages as spam, or just by filtering certain texts according to what any user chooses not to what to see anymore. TrueMessenger even enables you to assign your own spam rules, just like you can with e-mail. SMS spam is then either filtered out of your inbox or blocked altogether, so your inbox is kept clean, and you’re never left guessing who might be trying to reach you.
Hopefully, the next time we receive an SMS it won’t be an invitation to an opening or a sales alert of any kind!
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