Is Sarahah Stealing your Phone Contact & Personal Details?

Sarahah seems to be the entire craze today. It claims itself to be an ‘honest app,’ where users can send feedbacks to anyone while being completely anonymous.

Needless to say, the app has taken the internet by storm. However, it seems that all is not completely fair and transparent about this new internet sensation.

Many news reports raised one major question: Is Sarahah safe? This question was raised following the shocking discovery that Sarahah has been stealing users’ phone contacts and uploading the data to their servers.

The discovery was made by Zachary Julian, who works for an IT firm. He said, “As soon as you log into the application, it transmits all of your email and phone contacts stored on the Android operating system.”

Following this news report, the creators of Sarahah openly claimed that the app had indeed been uploading their app’s users’ phone contacts onto their servers as they are planning to soon launch a new feature in their app.

(Image Courtesy: The Intercept)

However, one major takeaway from this is that Sarahah’s acts can be seen as a major act of breach of privacy. The users don’t know what they’re signing up for, and the act of stealing their phone contacts and even emails is absolutely unethical.

So, is Sarahah safe? In all honesty, we don’t think it is. In fact, this is a trend that seems to have taken the world of internet by storm. Most of the services on the internet today are free, but despite that, companies are making millions and even billions. This is because; most of them indulge in stealing users’ data and selling it for a huge chunk of money. The user has become the product on the internet.

Sarahah stealing your phone contacts is also in direct violation of the right to privacy, which was very recently deemed as a fundamental right for the people of India. If an app steals personal data of a user, and later sells it to make money, then it is both a violation of the right to privacy act along with being highly unethical.

(Image Courtesy: The Hacker News)

What makes the situation even more gruesome is that the Sarahah manages to steal your personal data even on the more secure iOS platform. While Zachary Julian was running his tests, he discovered that Sarahah steals contacts from both Android and iOS phones and later uploads them on their private servers.

While Sarahah’s author has come out in public and claimed that this feature will be taken off in the next update, we as users need to make a sensible call here. To begin with, we know one thing for sure that Sarahah is not safe to use. Apart from becoming a breeding ground for misogynistic comments, body shaming, and eve teasing among other things, Sarahah has started to play with the privacy of people.

So, we as users need to do the rightful, and ditch the Sarahah app. We need to make sure that more people are educated about the dire consequences that an app like Sarahah can have its own users. We need to uninstall Sarahah and take to social media to educate the world about the unethical acts that Sarahah has been doing undercover. Remember, your privacy is your fundamental right, and strict measures should be put in place against anyone or anything that tries to breach it.

Will you uninstall Sarahah and let other people know how dangerous the app is? Let us know in the comments below.

(Featured Image Courtesy: Computer)