by
ankh » Thu Mar 21, 2013 12:41 pm
I hope someone at Sonic is checking the numbers reported; most of them so far mentioned do have lots of google hits as sources of odd calls.
I'm surprised there's no voluntary association collecting these -- instead I find dozens of apparently different websites offering to sell tracking info on whatever number you want for $0.99, and that cuts both ways.
Why aren't phone companies doing what UNIX host blocklists do -- collecting and confirming lists of bad sources and sharing them around, so everyone can use them to voluntarily block crap from being sent through their system?
One site I found mentions one reason for the silent phone calls we've been getting -- it's user behavior profiling, finding out where someone is at home during the day.
http://www.callhunter.com/guides/roboca ... -not-speak
"Modern business is no stranger to measurement and quantified optimization. The simple act of answering or not answering the phone tells quite a story. We live a life of patterns with tendencies to work, eat, and watch TV, etc. at roughly the same times each day. This includes availability to answer the phone. Probing calls are logged and analyzed to build an answer profile demonstrating probability to answer the phone. Targeted calling campaigns can be optimized by preemptively building an answer profile with probing. This allows for the best allocation of staff and lines. Probing isn't necessarily performed in isolation as it can be incorporated into any of the above mentioned practices. ..."
Imagine how useful that might be to the wrong kind of people.
