Call Blocking Now Available for Blackberries

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…

Tagged as: call blocking, privacy on mobile phones, PrivacyStar

Revised on December 18, 2009