Updated at September 26, 2016:
We have an official response from Reliance Jio.
“Jio takes its customers’ security and privacy very seriously. In keeping with its highest standards of governance, Jio does not share its customers’ data with any other entity. Any information captured by Jio is only for internal analysis to deliver better quality of service and recommend offerings from Jio’s product portfolio.” says Jio spokesperson.
Our original story from Monday, September 26, 2016, follows:
You are been tracked, well you would think it would be through your online space like Facebook, Google etc. But this time, it seems all your phone information being sent to wrong hands.
Yet again the Indian telecom operator, Reliance Jio seems to have a BIG privacy issue in hand. The revelation came from famous hacker group Anonymous India (@redteamin), who accuses Reliance Jio allegedly sharing users phone call information with third parties.
According to Anonymous, your call data is being sent to foreign servers located in USA and Singapore. Well, you can guess all the data in the eyes of NSA, PRISM, and other global surveillance. It’s still not clear what type of user data is being shared with the third parties and what they are doing with the data.
Back to the leak, the anonymous group claims that Reliance Jio users VoLTE voice call data are being sent to foreign servers. The hacker group has shared the method and proof of their work to cement the claims.
The hacker group uses ‘Burp’ tool (a platform for performing security testing of applications) to analyse the data packets sent by the JioJoin Jio4G voice app. So when you make VoLTE calls from the Jio apps, the calling data is sent at a random interval to some servers in USA and Singapore from mobile.
“Jio app is using third party SDK and not verifying what data the SDK is collecting and where it is sending… this violates the user privacy” read the comment by Anonymous.
You can follow the steps provided by the hacker group to verify the claims of Jio breaching your privacy.
Last year, the same hacker group found Reliance Jio’s Jio Chat app allegedly sending users private data to a Chinese server. But Jio discarded the claims saying all data from Jio Chat is sent only to its own servers in India and no data being routed out of the country.
The reference to the Chinese servers was because of Google maps services which do not function in China. So the app would need to rely on a local Chinese GPS solution for location based services. Do note that Jio Chat is available internationally in different countries including China.