Planning To Take A Loan Via An App? Your Data Might Be At Risk

Taking a loan during a financial crunch is just a few clicks away in this modern day and age. A plethora of apps now offer instant loans with just a click of a button. While the loan dispersal has gotten a lot easier these days, it also comes with a few highly-serious consequences that could make your life a hell.

I recently started getting advertisements on Facebook regarding apps that can offer instant loans on both Android and iOS devices. At first, these apps looked very lucrative, and claim to offer low-interest loans with zero or minimal documentation. In reality, they usually charge interest of over 36 percent per annum.

Out of curiosity, I also clicked on a few of these apps, which took me to the Google Play Store page. Similarly, on my iPhone, I was redirected to the App Store. While online security and personal data collection are at an all-time high, these apps just collect almost everything that you have on your phone.

While cross verifying, I saw that these apps collect a lot more data on an Android smartphone when compared to an iPhone. This data collection includes your precise location, and personal information including name, email address, user ID, address, phone number, and other information as a part of fraud prevention and security compliance.

If you think this is the worst, then I would also like to remind the fact that, most of these apps also collect message data, photos, videos, files, documents, contacts, app activity, app info, and device IDs. To sum it up, these apps just clone your phone and will store all your personal data on the cloud.

Forget Loan, Don't Even Install These Apps

If you get an ad on Facebook or any other online platform that claims to offer an instant loan, we suggest you keep away from them. These apps are just evil and your data can be heavily misused. They collect your personal information as soon as you install the app, and if your phone has some sensitive data, the same can be used in a traumatizing way.

It looks like these apps have found a loophole in the Google Play regulations that allow them to collect all sorts of data. While an educated person may realize this while giving access, a lot of users who want a quick loan might overlook all the warnings and give required permission to the app to collect necessary data from the device.

While they mostly missuse the data on those who fail to pay EMIs, there is no guarantee that these data of the rest of the users won't be sold to a third party. While most of these apps are also available on App Store, they cannot collect as much data as an Android smartphone.

Online portals are currently filled with similar complaints on how these apps torture users by morphing the photo/video. They even spam call all the contacts on your phone with the fake narrative are just the tip of the iceberg and what these apps can do with your data.

Why I haven't Mentioned Any Apps?

It's not a handful of apps that do this, the Apple App Store and Google Play Store are currently filled with 100s of instant loan apps. Another easy way to find this out is to look at the comment section, especially the comments with a one-star rating, which do speak the truth about these scary apps.

Always Take Loans From RBI Registered Institutions

Want a loan? Your bank or any other RBI-registered financial institution is the best buddy. While getting loans from these platforms might involve a bit of work, they at least won't steal your personal data and use the same to threaten you.