Reputation for phone numbers? Sounds like a good idea.

I want my reputation to be "Never answers unrecognized numbers and never buys anything over the phone ever, so don't even try".

Give me the most deadbeat phone number rating, please.

Sigh. When are we going to stop trying to use things that are not meant to be identifiers (ip addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, SSNs) as identifiers?

This is an interesting concept. I had talked to Telesign about including their initial PhoneID offering into the CRM product I was working on. At the time it was simply a reverse lookup with a bit of metadata, such as wireless or landline, etc.

As a consumer though, the risk score makes me a bit weary. These mechanisms are notoriously opaque and when they misfire, they do so spectacularly. I would hate to have the type of the phone number I use be tied to my credit worthiness or something...

There's some text missing: "Its immediately verifiable"... AND "normally linked to your real life name, full address, age, and social security number".

That's the scary part.

Not even mentioning that the phone number reputation score won't really just be a phone number score. it's going your human score - just like your CC Credit score but worse. Scary much? Welcome to the future. Just as bad as predicted.

This is already almost the case (albeit qualitative)

Try to register an account with some websites using a Twilio number, and it will get blocked / stopped. Try the same with a Google Voice / Skype number and you might be OK. You'll also see challenges with land lines vs mobile numbers.

We really need phone numbers v6 so we can give each entity we interact with a unique phone number.

At first I thought this meant they would use the phone number as a proxy to your personal reputation, which was very troubling, but then I realized that's not the case. They are merely trying to predict whether a phone number is real or fake (fraud detection).

It doesn't sound like an end-run around around anonymity, but more like the way retail stores crunch data to predict personal purchase patterns.

It's a CAPTCHA for criminals.

thought this was particularly interesting especially when thinking about how Android 4.4 / Google is now attempting to display unknown caller id by using data collected from companies like these

And you think I will sign up for your service if you require a phonenumber? Are you retarded?

Well this is going to get interesting, when they start reusing telephone numbers.

Nothing new afaik. I thought telephone numbers have been used all the time as one part of assessing reputation. As well as when you order cabs or pizza (or what ever), if 100% of hundreds of the calls you have made this far have been pranks, I'm quite sure they won't send more pizza or cabs. Or if you're making 10th bomb threat today, and you'll keep doing that on daily basis as local village idiot. Same applies to telephone marketing companies, I haven't ever bought anything, and they're not trying to sell me anything anymore.

I would warrant a guess that they're doing a number of signalling queries against a number: checking for call-forwarding, asking what the location of that number is versus a proposed location from a customer and then based on a number of these factors, producing a score. How they recon they can profile a number without associated history of a number, I don't know.

If you know SS7 signalling and MAP queries, you can probably guess how to do this.

>illings emphasizes that they’re not directly using their clients’ data, but they are using the metadata around numbers.

I hate the precedent that this is becoming ok.

I could see this eventually being tied into a Klout score, and different tiers of customer service being provided based upon it.

Well that's great. I was literally just working on this. Going to bed now.