
Your Phone Number Is Going To Get A Reputation Score - Amadou
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/your-phone-number-is-going-to-be-scored/
======
malandrew
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.

~~~
dangrossman
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
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?

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ams6110
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?

~~~
josteink
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
Nope:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Purpose_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Purpose_and_use)

~~~
josteink
Thanks for the reply and the correction!

Ok. So you have me on one thing: it wasn't _originally_ intended to be used as
a personal identifier. You learn something new every day.

But then according to your very own link, it has universally been used and
repurposed for this exact thing for the last 45 years, without issues, and
with duplicate SSNs no longer being a problem.

I'd say that sounds like a very proven form of identification. So what problem
do you (OP / ams6110) have with people using it as such?

~~~
ketralnis
> without issues

That's a stretch. Because:

> So what problem do you (OP / ams6110) have with people using it as such?

A SSN is the "secret" bit to a small amount of otherwise-public info (name,
address, some other bits) to getting a loan or credit card or other credit-
related actions in my name.

I went to a small two-year school that used SSNs as their personal identifier
numbers. Someone broke in and stole student records. Now the school's poor
identity choices has put thousands of students' financial identities at risk.

~~~
RexRollman
I remember the state of Virginia used to use SSNs for driver's license numbers
but I've heard they've stopped doing that.

------
sologoub
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
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.

------
zobzu
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.

~~~
zobzu
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.

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hayksaakian
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.

~~~
sologoub
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).

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

------
tantalor
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.

~~~
acqq
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.

~~~
tantalor
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.

~~~
acqq
Your point that "only criminals would use throwaway phones to register
accounts" is completely wrong (I'm surprised you haven't even used
"terrorists" witch such a line of reasoning). There's no site that I want to
give my phone to, and I'm certainly not involved in any illegal activities.
Ever heard for privacy in the digital age? Anything you won't protect will be
sold and replicated in as many databases as possible.

If some site like Google would insist on the phone number, I'd buy a SIM card
only for that purpose.

But now there is a push to even not accept such "for one purpose" phone uses.
Bad, awful for privacy.

------
BorisMelnik
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

------
tomjen3
And you think I will sign up for your service if you require a phonenumber?
Are you retarded?

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

------
Sami_Lehtinen
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
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.

------
crmd
>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.

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

~~~
newman314
And that adds value how?

~~~
kamkazemoose
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.

~~~
newman314
I very much do not like Klout because it essentially assumes that you are a
active social media user. There is a large percentage of people that I deal
with daily on a professional basis that do not use social media whatsoever.

There should not be a penalty for not using social media.

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

~~~
Amadou
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.

