Isn’t it annoying when you have a number in your phone that
you don’t know who it belongs to? Maybe it’s in a text message or in the call
log. You can simply pick up the phone and call to ask who it is..or what if
there was a service to do that for you without soliciting from the other end?
Now that all people who have SIM cards are registered with
their mobile service providers wouldn’t it make more sense to get value from
this titanic database if there was a service to link a number with a
name/location?
So how would the service work? Maybe it would be a simple
query where you send the number via SMS to a short code and you get a response.
Or use a USSD code to interact with a user through a menu to answer a few
questions and then get a response through SMS.
However such a service would receive criticism due to the
question of how do you maintain customer information confidentiality? This to
me is the interesting bit. Either we create a program to read phone logs
[missed and received] or messages [received] and we limit searches to only
those numbers retrieved from the mentioned sources (logs and messages) as they
are unsolicited.
The other would be for the service provider to query a
person’s phone records to determine first whether the number in question indeed
exists in the received calls/messages, then give an appropriate response. What
do you think?
