Verizon gets patent for “call snooping”

January 3rd, 2007 by Mitch Brisebois

On Tuesday, Verizon got patent 7,158,623 granted. It refers our Call Context patent.

Titled “Method and apparatus for dial stream analysis”, it sounds impressive enough. Here’s the abstract:

Interests of a person may be analyzed based on the dial stream to/from the person. When a call is being made to/from a person, signaling information from the dial stream is routed to an analysis server. Information in the signaling information, such as called party identifier and caller-id data, is retrieved and archived by the analysis server. Based on the information in the dial stream, a person’s interests may then be analyzed and provided to a recipient, such as a business. The person may be compensated in exchange for allowing their dial stream to be analyzed. In addition, businesses may also register with the analysis server.

This is hilarious! Verizon managed to patent the idea of selling your calling records – possibly so that telemarketers can get to know you better! How noble.