Ever wonder what your phone number can tell about you?  What if one day, instead of being asked for your social security number to check your background, you were asked for your phone number?

TeleSign is a company that helps service providers authenticate people.  Not a clue what that means?  That’s simple, if you are using Facebook, Google or Twitter, and use two-factor authentication to login and make sure you are not easily hacked, TeleSign is one of the companies that help make that possible.  It sends you a code to your mobile which you then enter into the website.

“The tide turned when Google started offering two-factor in 2010. When free email providers started doing two-factor, a lot of people asked why their financial services weren’t doing the same thing,” TeleSign’s CEO Steve Jillings stated.

But Telesign sees more to phones than them just being used to authenticate online accounts, it wants to give more power to your phone numbers via PhoneID Score.  What it does is rank your phone number based on the services you use.  This will help determine if the person is using a burn phone or a high-quality one.

PhoneID Score helps companies that offer services filter out applicants, and see if the people are fraudulent, scammers, service abusers or not.  Most web companies want to attract as many users as possible. But they don’t want scammers, spammers, and bots using their web applications. Companies use everything from email verification to IP address bans to increasingly complicated CAPTCHAs to keep problem users out of their systems, but Telesign is hoping to make things simpler. Companies just send TeleSign a user’s phone number via its REST API  to receive the user’s real-time score, risk levels and recommendations.

“We each have a unique mobile identity tied to our phone number that is linked to a wealth of information, from where we live to our online activities. This makes the phone number the most efficient and conclusive method to identify fraud online,” said Telesign’s CTO Charles McColgan in the release.

“PhoneID Score introduces a new way for companies to quickly verify transactions, block fake accounts, and prevent eCommerce fraud, based simply on a phone number.”

TeleSign will be able to see who the number is registered to and the longer the phone number has been used by the same person, the better score it will have.  Plus if the number shows that a person is using it for a service that it is attached to one of Telesign’s clients, then you’ll have additional points for that.

You don’t have to worry about your privacy as TeleSign doesn’t directly use the person’s data, just the metadata around the numbers, such as what services it is tied into, and how long have you been using it.