A US-based analytics company facing allegations that it received personal data from the official mobile app of Prime Minister Narendra Modi without the consent of app users, has said that it does not sell, rent or re-market data.
"CleverTap employees don't have access to any of the data stored with it by a publisher," Anand Jain, co-founder of California-based firm, told PTI in a short e-mail statement when asked if his company has access to users' personal information from the NaMo App.
The five-year-old US-based startup founded by three Indians is facing the heat after a pseudonymous researcher 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, who goes by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson, in a series of tweets, pointed the privacy lapses in the NaMO App and alleged that mobile marketing platform CleverTap was the beneficiary of the data transfer.
"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 send without your consent to a third-party domain called https://bsmedia.business-standard.comin.wzrkt.com," the researcher tweeted.
The BJP, however, said the permissions required are all contextual and cause-specific and that the data is being used for only analytics using third party service.
In a blog post yesterday, Jain without making any reference of the NaMo App, said, "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."
"The data collected by the publisher and shared with a service provider is governed by the publisher's privacy policy. We neither control how publishers frame their privacy policies nor review them."