Earlier this week a Boston area start-up called First Orion announced a new privacy service for Blackberry users. Called PrivacyStar, it blocks unwanted calls, lets subscribers manage their list of blocked callers via a web portal, and facilitates reporting of abusive telemarketers to US regulatory authorities. It also offers intelligent features such as reverse look-up of unknown callers – people whose names and phone numbers are not in the phone’s address book.
The service is initially offered for Blackberry users, via a direct-to-the user subscription model. First Orion promises to release versions for other leading smartphones in 2010. Pricing is $2.99 per month, after an initial 30-day free trial.
If you’ve ditched your landline and are now plagued with unwanted telemarketing calls (or calls from ex-boyfriends or people you have “unfriended”), this service could be very cool.
My Take
Great Idea, But It Needs to Support the Right Phones
There are no Blackberries in our household, so we need to wait for the iPhone version in 2010. That said, we don’t get many unwanted calls on the iPhone.
Almost all the telemarketing calls to our household dial the landline phones; few such calls are placed to our cell phones on a regular basis – largely because we don’t give out our cell phone numbers except to family, friends and trusted providers.
We’ll be much more excited about PrivacyStar when it supports wireline phones on the Qwest network.
If Only PrivacyStar Had Been Available Sooner
Having said that, we had a bad experience for months after adding a second mobile phone to our Verizon account. We received multiple robo-calls a day from a call center — a collection agency chasing the previous owner of this phone number. It took months to resolve the situation, with no help from Verizon. We were caught in the loop, and there was no easy way out.
Verizon did not offer a blocking service, and the call center masked its caller ID. When we finally located the call center (after considerable research), the IVR phone system required an account number, which we lacked. It took months before we found someone at the collection agency who was in a position to stop the calls once we had explained the situation.
Had PrivacyStar been available for our phone at that time, we would have been thrilled to subscribe. It would have saved us a lot of hassle. $2.99 a month would have been a great deal, compared to the aggravation we were experiencing from those robo-calls from someone else’s collection agency.
But these days our mobile phones are generally free of unwanted callers.
Having said that, once mobile advertising really gears up, a blocking service might become necessary. A boon to consumers, even if a “Tivo-like” curse for the advertisers.
Blocking service Wireline Phones, Please
I’ll be even happier when PrivacyStar is available for our landline phones, but am aware there are lots of issues on the carrier side…
Despite being on the “do not call” lists, we still get 6-10 unwanted telemarketing calls a day. Some of these are technically illegal; others are grey areas, such as former providers calling repeatedly to get us to reinstate service. I can think of lots of unwanted callers we’d like to block.
How many times do you have to tell the local newspaper that you no longer want to subscribe? Or tell your phone company to stop annoying you with offers of “high-speed Internet service” – when they can deliver nothing faster than ISDN speeds to your home?
Good luck to First Orion. I look forward to the day when we can add PrivacyStar to our Qwest phones…
