From the wording it's not at all clear that you plan to message their contacts telling them to remind the customer/victim about their outstanding loan. Furthermore, do you get the consent of the people in their contact list in the first place?
I am curious. As a thought experiment, how else can having the contacts of your friend and family be use to remind you of your bills, without contacting them to remind you?
I’m sorry but their warning really is not very clear. They write:
“I understand that my contacts will be uploaded and saved on GalaxyCard, and that they will be used to calculate my eligibility and remind me of my bills.”
Note the use of ‘remind me of my bills’ at the end of that sentence. If this company truly wanted to be clear, they could have written that:
“I understand that my contacts will be uploaded and saved to GalaxyCard, where they will be used for two major reasons. First, they will be used to verify that I am eligible for this service. Second, if I am late to pay my bills, I understand that GalaxyCard will contact my contacts to tell them that I have not paid my bills.”
That is significantly more clear as it specifically states they will contact your contacts if you are late.
Or they will contact them to look for you... like every debt collection service in the world. That you aren’t paying your bills, might be inferred by your friends but they aren’t forced to come right out and say you are delinquent from the get go.
They pointed to another app that does this as an example of what they do. The reviews from that app indicate that coming out and saying they are delinquent is exactly what they do.
“We first contact the user if they don't pay despite calls/emails/push notification/sms for 45 days. Then we warn them for 15 days that their contacts will be asked to remind them of the bill, as per the terms. Finally we contact the contacts.“
This company specifically contacts the contacts to remind the delinquent person of their bill. I don’t think that warning is very good in light of this practice. Do you?
Considering that, I would concede that they could have spent a sentence or two more detailing what they intend to do, instead of burying it in a contract.
- We added a checkbox which reads out everything about how the contacts will be contacted, after Google first asked us. The user is required to check the checkbox before he can even get the permission dialog to give the permission.
- You are right. We are not doing something out the jurisdiction. The contacts notified are the ones who have agreed to be sent "promotional" messages. So we don't spam these people. We are also working on something to make the loans a "group" loan that will make it a requirement for other people to be "fiscally" responsible for your unpaid loan
We run an algorithm which tries to ascertain that the contacts list is not fake/empty. Uninstalling the app would only prevent us from getting new contacts, and ability to notify you of your pending bills via push notification.
The commonality I was referring to is not having a "Checkbox" before uploading contacts as is required by Play Store.
We are giving the APK as an option to people who are reaching out on support about bugs. But most people don't have the know how of how to enable installing from unknown sources
I can understand your dislike to the practice, however, this is something common among a lot of online lending businesses for people who are defaulting on purpose, without a reasonable cause. Here are a few examples: Z2P - Get Instant Loans, Borrow Money, Loan App Instant Personal Loan Online-MoneyWOW
In the US, discussing financial issues with anyone other than the people on the account is HIGHLY illegal. There are very strict rules around who you can contact and what you are allowed to say.
Yeah I am sick of this excuse. I have seen it a lot around privacy issues. People always say things like "everyone including google is doing it so its perfectly ethical to copy them".
Contact book presence is but one input into that algorithm, which also incorporates friends of friends, friends of people who've logged in from the same IP, people who frequently interact with the same people/content. Its not directly "You might know Alice, we know because she has your number"
These people are not poor. They assume that since it's an app they taking money from, they can simply refuse to pay. We can, and do, go for the legal route, but it's much much more painful for the user, and for us, even if we want to settle it once a case is filed.
Dude you LOST, you and India's laws are morally bankrupt about it, you are NOT heroic! You claim that your customers are not poor but by definition you stupid lending app is praying in the poor and low IQ people to make you money. STOP
> This app so far was good. Recently I has got worse. I had my dues 2days back .and they keep calling, I know it's their job but they should understand the current situation going on because of lock down. Even worse they are threatening to call all the people from my contacts lists. I don't evenknow how they got the all the contact lists.
> Dont install . One of the worst app Kindly dont ever try One of the harassing app My due date was 26mar due to lock down I was unable to pay I had inform then they started texting to my whatsApp contacts..
> One of the worst app Kindly dont ever try One of the harassing app My due date was 14 mar due to some problems I was unable to pay I had inform them On 15 th they started texting to my whatsApp contacts
> Worst service i have taken 6times loan everytime i paid on time but this time 2day late, they hacked my contacts and start sending the sms and create problem for me
[1]: https://jenkins-x.io/docs/reference/devpods/