Privacy Statement
ScamShield Privacy Safeguards
Your privacy is our priority. We value your privacy and protect your data with utmost care.
ScamShield Bot:
Our WhatsApp Bot follows strict security measures to keep your information safe and confidential. We cannot read your other chats on WhatsApp.
When you submit a report to the ScamShield Bot, the Singapore Police Force (SPF) will be able to see the information you have submitted through the ScamShield Bot and the time stamp at which the report was submitted.
Here is the data that is collected by the Bot and accessible to the SPF:
- For Message Reports: A copy of the submitted message, the reported sender information, where the scam message was received.
- For Call Reports: The caller’s number or ID, the info submitted about the call, where the call was received.
ScamShield App:
The ScamShield App is an application that works actively in the background to facilitate the detection, reporting and blocking of potential scam calls, as well as potential scam messages from unknown numbers not in your contact list.
The application does not have access to your contact list or any private data found therein. Further, ScamShield cannot access the contents of SMSes already in your inbox prior to installation of ScamShield, and it cannot access your call log.
We are committed to safeguarding your privacy and we only store the data necessary for the App to function. Further, we align ourselves with the strict privacy parameters set by Apple for iOS, and by Google for Android, and we follow the commercial best practices of data protection and data governance.
For full transparency, the only data we collect and store from the Apps include:
- Contents of messages that are flagged up by the ScamShield App as potential scam messages
- The sender ID and/or contact number(s) of the person who sends such potential scam messages
We do not store any other data and there are no identifiers to trace back to any individual users of the application. For the avoidance of doubt, only SMSes that the ScamShield application determines to be potential scams are automatically reported and sent to the Singapore Police Force, and the ScamShield App does not have the capability to read any other messages on your phone.
ScamShield works hard to ensure that you are protected from scam messages, however, like all technology, it is not perfect, and some legitimate personal messages may be wrongly classified as potential scam messages. You need not worry, we do not take any further action on these messages, but may use them to train the machine learning algorithm to better recognize which messages are scam and which messages are not. If you feel that a message was wrongly classified as scam, you may write in to us at scamshield@ncpc.org.sg.
Upon the conclusion of their review process, the Singapore Police Force may recommend to blacklist numbers that are involved in scam activities. The SPF may also work with the Ministry of Communications and Information (“MCI”) for further investigations, if necessary. All information will be kept strictly confidential for the purposes of such investigations.
If you feel that your number might have been blocked as a scam number by ScamShield, you may write in to scamshield@ncpc.org.sg. This is subject to the conclusion of the review process by the Singapore Police Force regarding your number.
Tailoring Your Experience
Users may, at their full discretion, turn off any or all of the features of ScamShield on their devices. By going to the device settings, you can turn off the automatic filtering and reporting of scam messages, the automatic blocking of calls from scam numbers, and you can even turn off push notifications on the latest scam typologies. By doing so, you acknowledge that your user experience will be affected and the application will not function as intended.