May I verify you through the phone?

February 23, 2010 5:21 PM

Phone/text verification filter. MeFi, what implementation of this would be useful to your average web user?

So I'm trying to come up with ideas on how phone or text verification can be used to benefit your average web user. I know craigslist and ebay require phone/text verification for some categories, as do some online communities and other marketplaces. But how can this technology help your average person? What if it was under their control?

posted by 913 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I'll try, but here's my general opinion: Phone/text verification isn't really there to help "your average person" (you mean the user?). Its there to help prevent fraud. Robots can large numbers of accounts on sites without protections and then use those accounts to spam everyone else. Here's the main reason why we use phone/text verification - its enormously expensive to create unique phone numbers where you can receive text messages. Spammers have a much harder time getting a bunch of unique phone numbers than to do getting a bunch of random email addresses. You know the images with garbled text/numbers that you have to copy on many account creation processes that you've seen? That's done by Captcha, and the goal is rougly similar to why some sites have started using SMS. The benefit to the average user here is (hopefully) less fraud in the system... no real direct benefit in most cases.

The other, generally less significant reason for text/phone verification is that Captcha verification is much hard to do on mobile phones. Lots of people, especially outside the US/EU, use a web-enabled phone as their primary computer. Sites looking to grow in developing markets need to come up with ways to let people register for accounts without opening the flood gates to spammers. In this case you could say there's a benefit for the user -- allowing them to register from their phone / primary computer. But I'll still contend that the verification process itself is just a speed bump meant to separate robots from humans. Making it really easy for humans and really expensive for robots seems like the most important goal.
posted by pkingdesign at 10:43 PM on February 23, 2010

Gah... Third sentance: "Robots can *create* large numbers of accounts..."
posted by pkingdesign at 10:44 PM on February 23, 2010