Never fight your way through a phone menu again
I’m sure most of you hate phone menus as much as I do. Hell, I recently moved my brokerage account away from E*Trade primarily because their phone system (and thus customer service) was an absolute disaster. Well, I just ran across a product which could change all that. *
Fonolo essentially allows you to call a company and skip the whole damn phone tree to get right to the person you want. Honestly, if it weren’t for the privacy concerns, I’d be jumping up and down and begging to sign up for the beta. This sounds like it could save hours of frustration.
Unfortunately, there is one big catch for me: all of your calls are routed through Fonolo’s servers and recorded. Do I really want them recording my call to my credit card issuer? Or bank? The ramifications of them having that data is beyond scary. I don’t know what there privacy policy is, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. How long until they get bought out? What happens to all that - potentially very personal - information then?
* I first saw mention of Fonolo in Seth Godin’s blog.
August 16th, 2008 at 12:52 am
I have a beta account with fonolo- the system works great, and the recording functionality is optional- it doesn’t records all your calls automatically.
It’s provided as a feature, on a call-by-call basis, for you to record all, or parts of a call, for your records.
August 16th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
John, first of all, thank you for the correction. I appreciate it.
However, even with optional recording I still have privacy concerns:
1) What if I decide after a call that I don’t want that history around? Does Fonolo have a purge mechanism? And if they do, how long does it take them to act? How about backups? As we’ve seen elsewhere on the Internet, there is no guarantee this record would ever go away for good.
2) Just because they say they’re not recording the call, how do I know this is actually true? It would make sense to transcribe calls for targeting advertising among other things. Fundamentally, I just don’t like the idea of having a third party in the call between me and whoever I’m calling.
3) The sale problem mentioned in my original post.
August 17th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
From the web interface, you can delete a previously recorded call; it removes it right away from the interface; how long that takes to *actually* be removed from the system, and backups, I don’t know- that would really be a question for the guys at fonolo.
Ultimately, you can say the same about any service that provides any sort of voice service, including telco’s that provide mobile and home phone services, whether you’re using “traditional” land lines, VOIP or a wireless device.
Teleco’s record your voicemail by request- who knows how long those recordings stick around after you delete them- and who’s to say they aren’t recording your call for marketing or targeted advertising.
Ultimately, no matter how you’re making a phone call, there is always *at least* one party (likely several) between you and the person you’re calling, all of whom have the ability to capture the call.
Honestly, I’m more worried about the bigger guys (the AT&T, Sprint, Bell, Telus, etc)- they have more to gain from content-base advertising, and are bigger targets for government interests, just because of the sheer volume of calls they do.
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