Facebook has done a lot of amazing stuffs on mobile and now the company is prepared to replace your Android phone’s dialer with the introduction of Hello, it will have a built-in caller ID and call blocker to filter any unwanted callers, while it may sound really good, the app might actually cause some discomfort in privacy issues, at least from what we understand from the functionality of the app itself.
We all know that Facebook asks users for our phone numbers when using the Messenger app and that’s how the dialer app will be able to identify callers. Apart from that, businesses that have fan pages on the social network with their phone numbers registered will be able to benefit from the service as users will be able to reach them out by searching their phone numbers via the app itself and users will be able to know which business is calling them on their phone.
While it does sound pretty good, privacy is still a main concern on the Hello app, there will still be cases where users can take advantage of the service and call you if they wanted to and this is definitely an advantage for online marketers. In Malaysia, there has been a trend with marketers here masquerading as a friend that has a too handsome or beautiful profile picture and lured users into adding them, if we decide to share our phone numbers with Facebook, these marketers could take advantage of this service to spam our mobile phones with unwanted calls and text messages.
At the end of the day, what Facebook truly wants to do is to make the world even more connected with its Hello app and we definitely commend on that, but until the company finds a way to tackle such privacy issues that we’ve been facing here, we shall keep an eye on how the company will make its dialer app useful enough to replace our smartphone dialers.
The Facebook Hello app is now available at Google Play, head on to the source link to download to your phone.
