3 ms·
> Doctor's office calling to confirm your appointment; restaurant confirming a seat reservation; delivery guy is outside and can't find your doorbell; Lyft/Uber
by Leace 8y ago
> Doctor's office calling to confirm your appointment; restaurant confirming a seat reservation; delivery guy is outside and can't find your doorbell; Lyft/Uber/whatever is nearby and is looking for you; pharmacy calling to inform about a prescription being ready; some store calling to inform that your order is ready to be picked up; insurance company calling about some claim; etc.
The problem is phone number that is short and easy to guess. Imagine replacing them with a longer token that would be generated each time you want to give someone else a way to contact you (e.g. displaying a QR barcode on your phone and letting the other party scan it). Then you'd share a unique identifier with all that parties. Delivery guy can get a token that expires after a while. If someone abuses their ability of contacting someone, the token would get revoked.
I leave the details and implementation as an exercise for the reader ;)
- MBCook 8y agoThat sounds like a huge hassle, which would probably make it a no-go.
- amelius 8y agoYes, it sounds like how PGP failed.
- mindslight 8y agoIt's actually a longstanding part of phone culture - "extension xxx". It doesn't need to be terribly long to keep out spam - having to enter a single digit would fix the immediate problem, and even when the spammers adapted 3 or 4 still seem sufficient.
- Leace 8y agoQR codes are widely used in China for example for quick transactions: https://a16z.com/2017/08/11/qr-codes-in-china/ https://a16z.com/2017/08/11/qr-codes-in-china/