CleverTap refutes charges of selling data of NaMo app users

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet project the Narendra Modi app is in the middle of a fierce controversy regarding user data privacy. CleverTap, a US-based mobile analytics and mobile marketing company is facing allegations that it received personal data from the official mobile app of Prime Minister Narendra Modi without the consent of users. The company, however has said that it does not sell, rent or re-market data.

The US-based startup is facing the heat after a security researcher named Elliot Alderson alleged that Modi’s app was pumping private information like name, email, mobile number, device information and location, to servers controlled by the firm without the users’ consent.

The researcher tweeted, "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 sent without your consent to a third-party domain called http://in.wzrkt.com."

Anand Jain, co-founder of CleverTap, said in a blog post, "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." CleverTap said that Amazon Web Services is its hosting provider. They maintain data-centres that are fully compliant with a range of certifications which allow finance, healthcare and government data to be stored in their data-centres.

The company argued that the customer data is stored in an encoded format optimised for performance, rather than stored in a traditional file system or a database.