Lagos Court Dismantles Truecaller's Consent Argument
Surveillance control · 22.09.2026

A Lagos court has picked apart Truecaller's main argument — and things got awkward even for an app that can recognize voices from your phonebook.

The core complaint: Truecaller collects phone numbers not just from its own users, but from everyone in their contact lists. Nobody asked these people for consent — their number simply shows up one day in the app, complete with first and last name, available to any paying user worldwide. One of the claimants, Esther Odunze, found out about it from a random salesperson who "found" her number and identity in the app — despite the fact that she had never registered with it.

The company's position was elegant: since a user consented to give the app access to their contacts, all the people in those contacts had supposedly consented too, automatically. Justice N. O. Oduromi's response was blunt: one person's consent is not another person's consent. Compliance on a shoestring.

The court also noted that the right to privacy covers not only a person's home, but their data, communications, and personal information as well — and this isn't some abstract principle, but a direct constitutional provision.

That said, the ending isn't exactly triumphant: the court dismissed the actual claim — the plaintiffs couldn't prove concrete harm from the number leaks. The judge noted that discovering someone found your number is unpleasant, but without economic damage, it doesn't count as a "violation" in the legal sense.

The outcome is mixed: the principle sides with privacy, but there's no compensation. Meanwhile, Truecaller keeps collecting the numbers of roughly 450 million people, most of whom have no idea they're part of this experiment in sharing personal data without asking.

Source: https://www.icirnigeria.org/truecaller-court-rejects-users-consent-for-processing-non-users-phone-numbers/