DO NOT IGNORE These Dangerous Privacy Options on Your Realme Device

Great hardware, nice built and no ads in UI; it’s a bang for the buck. If this is what you are thinking after buying a Realme phone, there is no other one well-fooled customer than you. Realme offers great hardware to compete in the market but when it comes to the software section, it failed drastically.

From the late monthly security patch updates to the hosting of Google Play banned apps inbuilt, Realme puts the customers’ data on stakes. The latest Color OS 6, though it came with a lot of changes to the UI, leaves these dangerous privacy options open to everyone.

I’m concerned more about the ‘identification of unknown numbers’ option rather to the curiosity of knowing who’s the caller with a number displaying on it is. Truecaller has an option to opt-out from the database list but Realme data policies have no such mention about the removal of the details from their identity servers. 

I want you to take a look at the screenshot below which says this,

“When this service is in effect, it may need to access some of your personal information. For example, Number identification needs to access the information of your calls or messages….”

Continuing to the point, it says that they gather the data who would enable this option (which is enabled by default). Read the following snippet of their policy,

“The number identification results provided by this service come from data provided by other users, public information available on the internet, and data provided by the third-party…”

The point is, why would a company allow third-parties access the data which is supposed to be with them securely.

Another dangerous privacy option on Realme that you think is actually helping you is the TouchPal keyboard. This keyboard is the default keyboard of the Color OS and claims to be offering secure transmission of passwords and other sensitive information to the services you are using on the phone.

If that so, why is TouchPal banned from Google Play store? Go to Google Play store and search for TouchPal keyboard. You will not find it. Because Google has removed it for violating their terms and sharing data to the third-parties.

If TouchPal is banned from play store, why is Realme still hosting it as the default keyboard? Don’t they know about the security issues involved? The other apps developed by CooTek were also banned due to disruptive advertising charges.

I went on to check the privacy policy of CooTek on TouchPal keyboard. Read the highlighted point from the screenshot below and explain me what it could mean in comments below. 

So, I sincerely advice you to disable the TouchPal keyboard on your Realme device and also the identification of unknown caller option. Not all user interfaces with no ads on its UI are safe. Beware!