Honestly App Sarahah Is Said To Be Collecting Contacts From Users’ Address Book Quietly

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A couple of days, the Internet was going crazy over a mobile phone app called Sarahah. Yes, if you are reading this, then chances are, you are still using the app to collect people’s honest opinion about you. While the overall idea of the app is a debatable topic, we have now learned something new about it. It has now been reported that the app is quietly copying all the contacts from its users’ address book to the company’s servers.

Yes, the same has been reported by a security analyst Zachary Julian. According to him, the app transmits all of your email and phone contacts stored on the Android operating system. It has been reported that Julian used a monitoring software called BURP Suite in order to discover this weird behavior of the app. For those of you who don’t know, the BURP Suite allows users to monitor the data that is being transmitted to the remote servers.

Once this news was taken to Twitter by the source, the app founder ZainAlabdin Tawfiq also responded on Twitter. According to him, the App is collecting all the contacts for a new feature called “Find your friends”, however, it is worth noting that this is an “upcoming” feature. This essentially means that the company is collecting data from users for a new feature which doesn’t even exists as of today. He said that the feature is being delayed due to a technical issue. Whether or not this feature will go live, is a huge question mark as of now.

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Well, not sure about you, but collecting data for a feature which is not even available yet, cannot be justified for most people. He further tweeted that the company’s database doesn’t hold the contacts and the data request will be removed in the next update. At the same time, it is also worth noting that the app does work well even when users don’t allow the app to access contacts. So, if you allowed the app to access your contact initially at the time of installation, then your phone’s contacts are saved on the company’s server.

Now what happens next is something that remains to be seen. As of today, the app has over 62 million users. With that said, we would like to know your thoughts on this. Are you using the app and if yes, what are your thoughts on the app collecting your contacts? Be sure to let us know by leaving a comment down below.

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