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.

So the telemarketers know who's worth harrassing..

[Type44Q]

...to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.

What do you want to bet those "high quality" numbers quickly become a target for telemarketers to plunder? :p

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

... when do my reputation scores start getting reputation scores?

Everything online does

[onyxruby]

Everything you do has an online score that has a given value to someone. Your slashdot account (and similar accounts) has an online score from any number of companies that monitor such websites for third parties. They look for for your influential posters, political views, shills accounts, who you look for and so on. You would then be valued according to your usefulness to the organization. These companies range from managing online reputations for companies to countries (ever notice certain stories get a lot of hits from Venezuela etc). Certainly facebook, twitter and similar accounts have companies that watch your reputation and score it as well.

If it's Amazon and you are a reviewer of products and nobody finds your reviews useful than your value is low. If your reviews are well thought of and highly considered you will start to get packages from companies hoping to a review. After a while you could become a professional reviewer without ever paying for packages.

Even things like credit scores aren't standardized anymore and haven't been for years. You could be a perfectly acceptable risk to buy a house, and get turned down for a credit card. You will have a different credit score from each agency based on what type of vendor is requesting your score and for what purpose. You will have one number for employment, another for renting, another for getting a car loan and so on.

The last I checked there are about 1500 different types of credit scores alone (do you know your behavior score?) and they change all the time. Your scores change all the time based on what you buy, where you buy it and when you buy it. Welcome to the world of big data. Don't fear big government, it's big business that you need to worry about.

Mine already has

[antifoidulus]

My phone # is 867-5309, it already has a reputation you insensitive clod!

Re:So the telemarketers know who's worth harrassin

[BitZtream]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_information_tones

Still works, I use the 'service disconnected' SIT code as the opening to my voicemail message. Pretty much stops spam after the first call. The SIT codes are very timing and tone sensitive, so you need a good recording and to be able to upload a file for your voicemail message rather than trying to record it with the phone mic.

Another end run aorund DNC?

[tompaulco]

Is this another way for them to pay absolutely no attention to the Do Not Call List? My number is on the DNC list, and yet I get about 6 calls a day from telemarketers. I get maybe three calls a week from people who have any legitimate reason to be calling me.
The fines are not stiff enough for violaters of DNC. Further, the telemarketers use caller ID spoofing to not present a legitimate callback number so that you can determine who they are in order to prosecute. The only way to actually catch them is to buy one of their products and find out where the money goes, and who wants to do that? Even when that happens they are probably being paid by another company to sell their wares, so you still wouldn't find the telemarketing company, although you should be able to find out from the company that apparently hired them.