Facebook won’t be happy until it fills your entire phone with apps, and now the social giant is reportedly working on a new Android dialler which taps into the company’s vast database, to identify and block those pesky nuisance calls.
Late last week Android Police noted that some FB users had received a message inviting them to give a new app, imaginatively called ‘Phone’, a spin. While clicking the link didn’t do anything, apparently due to the invites being sent out by mistake, we were able to catch a glimpse of the app’s download page and were also subsequently given a clue as to what it will offer if and when it officially goes live.
The invite read: “Phone is a new app that shows you info about who’s calling and automatically blocks calls from commonly blocked numbers.” Not exactly a stunning amount of information, but it doesn’t take a vivid imagination to conceive of Facebook making use of its overwhelming wealth of information on nearly everyone in the known universe to give us a name for a previously unknown number, or prevent us from getting cold-called by sales gremlins or other assorted phone-botherers.
Of course, for the privilege of cutting out PPI nob heads, Zuckerberg and co will probably want to up the ante and add some new privacy-draining T’s and C’s which would let them store all your incoming call information from now until the Martians invade. But who are we to argue with a smidgen of extra convenience in a world which is beset on all sides by people trying to grab a slice of us?
As you would expect, Facebook declined to comment on the new service. But if all goes according to plan in the test phase, we predict it won’t be long until the new Phone app is rolled out en masse because, let’s be honest, your data won’t mine itself.
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