Your Phone Number Is Going To Get A Reputation Score

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/your-phone-number-is-going-to-be-scored/

by Amadou • 13 years ago

88 47 13 years ago

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.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

Got any examples? I haven't had any problems...

What I have seen is some airlines unable to text my GV number, because they are working with an SMS provider that is only integrated with the major US wireless carriers and cannot send outside of those (Verizon, ATT, Sprint, T-Mobile).

malandrew• 13 years ago

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.

brianfryer• 13 years ago

"Choose your own rating" would be a nice feature.

dangrossman• 13 years ago

They're using the number as an identifier for the person behind it. Telesign is integrated into fraud and risk management systems. The clients aren't asking "should we market to this phone number?", they're asking "should we accept the credit card of this e-commerce customer with this billing phone number?". If you have a bad rating, you won't be able to do business with some companies you might want to, like having a bad credit score except nobody has to pull your credit.

To put the shoe on the other foot, if you wanted to create a startup that offered anonymizing VPNs to privacy-conscious techies, and offer a free trial, you'd have a spam/scam problem. That site would be very attractive to a large number of people wanting to do illegal things with it. You could filter a lot of them out by requiring a phone number on signup, verifying ownership of that number, and rejecting registration from any with a low reputation score. People using burner VOIP numbers or the same number to make accounts reported as fraudulent at other businesses would have a low score.

You probably don't want to have a bad reputation if you care about signing up for things online. Like they said, Telesign has a huge number of clients. Lots of other fraud detection systems, like MaxMind's which are recommended occasionally on HN, are built on top of Telesign's APIs as well.

qwerta• 13 years ago

Most burner numbers are for legitimate purposes. It is probably only way to avoid spam. Or other way: I did not gave my phone number to most of my paying customers, why should I give it to some random website?

summerdown2• 13 years ago

If you wanted to offer anonymizing VPNs to privacy-conscious techies, and first wanted to verify their identity, isn't that contradicting your own business model?

sologoub2• 13 years ago

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...

dsl• 13 years ago

I've had a few issues lately with my Bank Simple card being flagged as a prepaid card because of companies using "old" databases (as far as I can tell).

My account at Western Union was literally banned. I spent 2 hours on the phone with the American Express fraud department after linking my Simple debit card and getting flagged.

This sort of reputation system usually works 98%+ of the time, but when you get a false positive, there is literally no recourse.

I hope they are forced to provide profile information and "correction" services to consumers in the same way credit reporting agencies have to.

ams6110• 13 years ago

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?

thaumasiotes2• 13 years ago

IP addresses vary.

The entire point of my phone number, or my email address, is to identify me. Email doesn't get sent "to whoever is interested", it gets sent to designated people. How are those not meant to be identifiers?

damncabbage• 13 years ago

SSNs, IPs and Phone Numbers get reused. People often have multiple email addresses.

(Bonus: Yahoo! email addresses get reused too.)

Amadou2• 13 years ago

How are those not meant to be identifiers?

They are intended to be delivery points for messages, not identifiers for non-messaging uses. The fact that the two functions are similar does not mean they are identical. Treating them as if they are identical just creates all kinds of (often unexpected) failure modes where the two functions don't overlap.

josteink2• 13 years ago

Since when was a social security number not meant to be an identifier?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I presumed that was its one stated purpose?

minikites• 13 years ago

Nope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Purpose_...

emu• 13 years ago

One problem with using an SSN as a identifier is that the number exists for the administration of the Social Security system, so only people who pay into or will receive money from the system are eligible for a number.

Not everyone in the US is eligible for an SSN (e.g., some non-residents living in the US). When I first came to the US as a student, I had difficulty doing things like signing up for a credit card or a cellphone for this reason.

There are other numbers that systems sometimes but do not consistently accept, for instance an ITIN, which is the tax ID number the IRS will issue you if you aren't eligible for a SSN.

davidgerard• 13 years ago

When there isn't money in the idea. (Or in selling the idea, even if it's a completely wrong idea.)

rismay• 13 years ago

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

ISL• 13 years ago

Execute better, and you'll win anyway.

Amadou2• 13 years ago

Go the other way then -- come up with a service that protects people from ending up in these guys' database. Like a bugmenot for phone number validations.

alex_sf• 13 years ago

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

newman3142• 13 years ago

And that adds value how?

kamkazemoose• 13 years ago

If you receive a customer service call from a number with a higher klout score, you could send them to a 'VIP' agent that's been authorized to give them better deals or whatever. If you give better support to a few users who have a lot of twitter followers then that person is a lot more likely to tweet about a good experience and help the companies reputation. Otherwise if they have a bad experience they have enough followers that if they tweet about a bad experience, there's obvious harm there.

It's the same reason someone will have a bad experience and e-mail a company but get ignored. Once The Consumerist runs an article about it though, it gets fixed.

forktheif• 13 years ago

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

BorisMelnik• 13 years ago

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

tantalor2• 13 years ago

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.

acqq2• 13 years ago

It's not a kind of captcha, it's an "account discrimination" system. Everybody who cares about the privacy is affected, not only the criminals, and the text shows why: use the throwaway phone, get rejected at the site.

tantalor2• 13 years ago

My point was only criminals would use throwaway phones to register accounts. The only time I've ever used a throwaway was when I left my real phone in a cab.

viraptor• 13 years ago

Criminals can spoof the callerid and use your number whenever they want. It's easy to do and happens very often in the UK. Your rating is going to be "scammer" quite quickly if you're unlucky.

crmd• 13 years ago

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.

zobzu2• 13 years ago

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.

jrockway2• 13 years ago

The data's not scary, what's scary is how people use it. Credit scores are designed to quantify the risk of loaning someone money. If you use them for anything else (like screening job applicants), you're going to get bad results.

At that point, you might as well go back to measuring the distance between facial features.

zobzu2• 13 years ago

Well data is data its never going to be scary. Even a picture of chucky is just a bunch of bytes :P

We'll more facial recognition scariness soon enough. Right now its mostly just used for security cameras all around big cities, drones and in some databases at facebook and google.

tomjen3• 13 years ago

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

jrockway2• 13 years ago

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

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

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.

danhilton• 13 years ago

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.

Your Phone Number Is Going To Get A Reputation Score

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