To all my fellow Indians who are suggesting or trying out Jio products as replacements for the banned Chinese ones, please read privacy policies of their apps. Just because they are from an Indian company does not make them secure and private automatically. Thread 👇
JioBrowser is not a better alternative to UC browser. This is their privacy policy - jep-asset.jio.com/jio/emailer-ca…. According to this, they can store your personal and non personal information and share them with third parties for ads and promotional services.
The JioBrowser also stores all of your browsing history, downloads, permissions granted to sites, cache of the websites you visit and "Thumbnail-sized screenshots of pages that you visit most often" among other things.
All of these can be used to "provide you with marketing communications and advertising" and "provide you with recommendation about services you may be interested in, based on your use of the Jio Browser"
Solution: Firefox, DuckDuckGo or Brave browser are simply far better when it comes to protecting your privacy. Open source and treating your browsing data with respect.
Similarly, JioMeet is not better than Zoom. It looks like a copy of Zoom in design . And here is their privacy policy - jiomeet.jio.com/privacy-policy/.
JioMeet collects personal information about you ("name, age, gender, contact information, products and services you are interested in or require more information about") and can share it with affiliates to serve you ads and promotional services.
There are many red flags in that policy. I just mentioned the most obvious one.
Also - "JioMeet users, here’s all the data Reliance Jio will collect from you for accessing its “free” video call service" - financialexpress.com/industry/techn…
Also - "JioMeet users, here’s all the data Reliance Jio will collect from you for accessing its “free” video call service" - financialexpress.com/industry/techn…
Solution: Signal is the most secure and private option for personal video calling. Even apps like Duo, WhatsApp or FaceTime which are developed by mega-corps are end to end encrypted. JioMeet doesn't say anything about end to end encryption.
... Zoom will begin allowing users to enable end-to-end encryption of calls. You can continue with Zoom or Google Meet for business requirements. They both have their flaws though. You can try something like Jitsi Meet as an open source solution meet.jit.si
Next app on the list is JioSwitch (alternative to ShareIt/Xender). Here's their privacy policy - static.jiocloud.com/snw/android.ht…. It stores similar personal information (age, gender etc). It can also store your IP address, device ID, the IMEI, IMSI of your SIM etc
This "File Transfer" app may also collect "certain keywords and their counts from your SMS" in a way that does not identify you. 🤔(The app doesn't have the SMS permission on Android so this is not even possible, but it's there in their privacy policy 🤷)
Solution : TrebleShot is the best alternative to ShareIt (Free and open source) - play.google.com/store/apps/det… but you can try Files By Google or Easy Share as well
And last on today's list is JioChat - alternative to WeChat. The text messaging app that doesn't have end to end encryption in 2020. JioChat's design has some eerie similarities with WhatsApp. It's privacy policy can be found here - jiochat.com/condition/priv…
The app will collect same personal information as other Jio apps (name, gender, age, contact information etc). And sensitive personal information "will carry the meaning as may be defined by applicable laws from time to time".
And the privacy policy states - "You accept the inherent security implications of providing unencrypted information over Internet"
Solution : There are countless better alternatives to this app - Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp being the most popular ones.
signal.org/install/
signal.org/install/
Don't install the app on your smartphone just because it's #madeinindia. If it's developed by a for-profit privately run business, it should be analyzed in the same way we'd do with Google/Facebook/Microsoft etc. Support genuine Indian 🇮🇳 apps which also respect your privacy.
