Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score

Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Yes, there's yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will affect the kinds of services you're offered. Based out of L.A.'s 'Silicon Beach,' Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar 'verify that you received this code' texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones."

Comments

Both ways?

[BasilBrush]

Will it work the other way too? To weed out the tele-sales numbers from the people who's calls you do want to receive?

Re:Both ways?

[AmiMoJo]

I find the best thing to do is press 1 to speak to an operator, then when they answer say "oh, sorry, I'm interested but can you hang on just a sec, my pot is boiling over..." Then they get put on hold, where the "music" is just a generic household background sounds track I downloaded from somewhere. Sometimes they hang on for 10 minutes before giving up.