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."

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

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.