I first got to know about Duta in 2016 through a friend who suggested it would help me with my holiday package. He added me to a group and told me to simply ask whatever I wanted and it would answer me.
Fast forward, its 2019 and I use Duta so much for lots of stuff. So what is Duta? How does it work? Is it safe? Let’s look at this in detail.
What is Duta?
Duta™ is an Indian media company, serving millions of subscribers across the globe. It delivers breaking news, up-to-the-minute sports, entertainment news, engaging interactive services and devotional content via popular mobile messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Telegram.
Services Offered
- Wiki (eg. Wiki ride-hailing)
- Weather (eg. Weather Kampala)
- Time (eg. Time at Nairobi)
- Translate (eg. Translate French I am happy)
- Daily horoscope (eg. Astro 18012019)
- Dictionary (eg. Dict awesome)
- Calculator (eg. Calc 60+30)
- Currency price (eg. Finance UGX to USD)
- Sports Updates
- News
- Entertainment
- Quiz/Games
- Devotionals
How does it work?
It is an online robot or JavaScript program powered by Duta.in. To activate it,
- Copy this mobile number “+91 90420 17128 ” or this number ” +91 7397669317 ” and save as “DUTA” in your address book
- Open WhatsApp and select “options” and then select “create a new group”
- Select the number you just saved to add to the group
- Fill in group title with any name you like and proceed with group creation.
- Enter the new group and type in – * info.
- You will get a list of the various services offered
- You can now activate the services you want to receive.
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To add a new service automatically, all you have to do is type in “+service you want to activate” in the group and it will be automatically added without the need for saving each individual new contact to the group.
For example, to add the football service, all you need to do is type in: “+football” in the group.
Is it Safe?
The million-dollar concern is about your privacy. According to Duta’s Privacy Policy:
It may obtain the following types of information from or concerning you or your mobile phone device, which may include information that can be used to identify you as specified below;
- User-Provided Information: You provide certain Personally Identifiable Information, such as your mobile phone number, push notifications billing information (if applicable) and mobile device information to Duta when choosing to participate in various uses of the Duta Service.
- Duta will periodically access your address book or contact list on your mobile phone to locate the mobile phone numbers of other Duta users or otherwise categorize other mobile phone numbers as “out-network” numbers, which are stored as one-way irreversibly hashed values.
It does not collect;
- Names, emails, addresses or other contact information from its users mobile address book or contact lists other than mobile phone numbers the Duta mobile application will associate whatever name the Duta user has assigned to the mobile telephone number in his/her mobile address book or contact list and this occurs dynamically on the mobile device itself and not on Duta’s servers and is not transmitted to Duta.
- Location data, but users may voluntarily share their location with other users via the Duta Service.
- The contents of messages that have been delivered by the Duta Service are not copied, kept or archived by Duta in the normal course of business. The contents of any delivered messages are not kept or retained by Duta the only records of the content of any delivered messages reside directly on the sender’s and recipient’s mobile devices