Not Anonymous anymore

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?