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Facebook's "Hello" Tells You Who's Calling Before You Pick Up

Posted by samzenpus on from the who-is-it? dept.

Mark Wilson writes: When you receive a call you'll usually see the number of the caller, but this may not be helpful in identifying them before you decide whether to pick up. Facebook's answer to this problem is Hello. This new app comes from the Facebook Messenger team and aims to tell you more about the person getting in touch with you even if you don't have their number saved in your address book. Currently available for Android, the dialer app also allows for the blocking of calls from individuals.

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Good reason not to tell FB by ugen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is yet another reason not to give Facebook your phone number (or any other real/valuable personal information)
    Also, not sure about other people, but for callers who didn't make their name private I see the name on my iPhone (not that it matters).

  2. Re:Caller ID by unrtst · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (disclaimer: I'm on slashdot so I didn't read the article or fully research this)

    My initial reaction is that this is actually one of the first and greatest uses of social media and phone integration... assuming they're doing what I think they're doing (though, if so, there's some minor privacy leakage).

    If I'm right, then this *should* work just as well around the world as long as people use facebook about as much in those places. I'm assuming, since this comes from their recently touted FB Messenger team, that:
    * Messenger has your FB account (duh)
    * Messenger permissions snag your personal phone number (MANY apps do this, or at least IMIE/etc)
    * When you get a call, their app checks their DB of phone numbers (a great many of which have been verified via the app), and gets the lookup.
    * If there's no lookup, it can then fallback to other lookups (whitepages, google, other DB's and such)

    I really wish this was around a long time ago. The transition to everyone having unlisted phone numbers (ie. cell phones) destroyed a significant feature of Caller ID. This could bring that back a little. Though it's mostly going to be people I probably know already, this would be great any time you lose your address book somehow, and you can stop adding folks to your address book just so you'll know what number it is (ie. keeping your ex in there under some pseudonym just so you know not to answer when craycray2005 calls).

    As far as privacy... if someone is calling me, screw their privacy. They can tell me who they are, or I'm not answering. BTW, if a creditor calls and says something like "Is this Mr So-and-So?", keep replying with stuff like, "Who can I say is calling?", "Who is this?", "Dunno, who are you calling for?". They love that. And definitely tell them that, "your call may be recorded for, wink-wink, quality control purposes on this end as well".

    Anyway... I don't have a problem with this as long as it's simple phone number -> name lookup.