TrustFabric this week announced the launch of their Child Protect service. The new service helps protect children from inappropriate content such as adult SMS services. The new service lets parents associate a date of birth with the mobile phone number and email address of their child.
TrustFabric Child Protect lets content providers and sin industry brands (alcohol, tobacco, gambling etc.) to act more responsibly and exclude children from adult content and direct marketing.
By using the Child Protect service, content providers can find out if a mobile phone number or email address belongs to a child before access is granted to certain content.
Social networks, websites and instant messaging services can use the new service to make sure that no children under 13 years are allowed to sign up and ensure that underage users don’t provide the wrong date of birth when they join.
“I encourage all parents to start using the Child Protect service,” says Pieter Streicher, MD of BulkSMS.com and founder of Parentscorner.org.za. “The service can have a big positive impact. I believe most local wireless application service providers will choose to act ethically if they have an efficient way to exclude minors from adult services.” says Streicher.
Over the last two months TrustFabric has worked to design and implement the Child Protect service to ensure that content providers are able to more accurately and effectively provide different user experiences for adults and children and comply with legal requirements to protect minors.
TrustFabric Child Protect is a free service. “It takes less than three minutes for a parent to add their child’s mobile phone number and associate a date of birth. A verification code will be sent to the child’s mobile phone via SMS. The parent’s mobile phone number is also verified, so parents will need to have both their phone and their child’s phone handy,” says Joe Botha, CEO of TrustFabric.
Once a Child Protect record is created it can only be removed by the parent and the parent will receive an email and SMS if this happens.
“Adult entertainment, gambling, alcohol and tobacco brands can all benefit from using TrustFabric Child Protect. We are in the process of talking to a number of businesses about implementing the service,” says Botha.
“A number of parents have expressed concern about the type of adult SMS services often advertised late at night on television. We’d like to see the mobile phone networks take a more pro-active role in making sure content providers on their networks are not reaching the wrong audiences,” says Botha.
“Our goal is to offer parents more control and peace of mind when giving their children mobile phones. We think most parents would like to see more technology designed to protect children,” says Botha.
“The success of this service depends on how many people start using it. TrustFabric already has more than 1000 users and 40 businesses signed up. I’d like to encourage users to tell their friends and other parents about this new service,” Botha concludes.
Owning data is expensive for businesses because of the operational costs and processes involved.
I’ve been talking to a fair number of businesses about VRM and better ways to let their customers keep their own information up to date and giving customers more control.
Many businesses believe that it’s their job to keep all their customer data accurate. They also seem fairly comfortable knowing that a big percentage of the data they have is wrong and outdated. Often they have multiple customer records for the same person.
They seem to have convinced themselves that this is the norm and it’s just fine, because they feel it’s “their customer data”.
If you zoom out a bit… it’s not their data. It’s the customer’s data. The question should be: how do they get access to the data?
If you think about this problem at scale it becomes rather scary. Millions of businesses all spending time and resources chasing the same ever changing personal information of billions of customers – and doing a poor job of it.
If you are interested in how businesses can get access without the ownership drawbacks have a look at TrustFabric Connect.
We tested and released TrustFabric Child Protect (as Beta v1.3 of TrustFabric Connect). The new service helps protect children from inappropriate content and helps vendors comply with regulation around the protection of minors.
We had an encounter with a patent troll – somebody who thinks they have a valid South African (2009) patent on VRM and personal data store services. We learnt that SA has a non-examining patent system and there are some free to use US patents which cover personal data management going back to 1996. Seems most start ups have to deal with this at some point – “Startups are like young calves cavorting across the green fields of commerce.”
Last week we spent a day making some interview style videos for our website…
Business Services Intro:
Tech Intro:
Background info: Shot with two Canon 5DmkII’s using 24-70 and 70-200 lenses. The jazzy intro and exit is a track called Blue Seven by 08 Trio (Creative Commons).
An interview style introduction video for our new Child Protect service.
Background info: Shot with two Canon 5DmkII’s using 24-70 and 70-200 lenses. The jazzy intro and exit is a track called Blue Seven by 08 Trio (Creative Commons).
This release includes the first version of TrustFabric Child Protect. This service helps protect children from inappropriate content by letting parents associate a date of birth with the mobile phone number or email address of their child.
Approved content providers can query the Child Protect registry to find out if a mobile phone number belongs to an adult before access is granted to certain content.
You will find a Child Protect item in the left nav when you are logged into the TrustFabric Connect service.
New features in this release:
A new signup workflow and various user experience tweaks.
Headline: TrustFabric bids to operate national opt-out registry
TrustFabric announced this week that they will bid to become the operator of the national opt-out registry. The opt-out registry lets you block unwanted direct marketing.
The Consumer Protection Act (CPA) came into effect on 1 April this year. It protects your right to privacy and lets you opt-out of direct marketing. Irresponsible direct marketing is a huge problem, especially SMS marketing where an opt-out reply costs money.
Direct marketing has become big business. Our personal information is being traded and sold, but the CPA makes it illegal to contact a person who has added their contact details to the national opt-out registry.
There has been some controversy over who should operate the registry. The National Consumer Commission published a notice stating that they are planning to name the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) as the operator of the national opt-out registry unless objections are submitted by 29 July.
Is there a conflict of interest in the DMA operating the opt-out registry? This question sparked Twitter and blogging activity last week.
“Operating the national opt-out registry is a great responsibility. It should be run by a trusted and independent entity and it should be very user friendly,” says Joe Botha.
Joe is the CEO of TrustFabric, a Cape Town startup. They launched an alternative to the DMA’s opt-out service in June. “TrustFabric Connect gives users a way to define how businesses are allowed to contact them via email, phone, text message and snail mail. It’s an Advanced Opt-out service, which is aware of business relationships and is designed with the Consumer Protection Act and the Protection of Personal Information Bill in mind,” says Botha.
“Our focus has been on making the service convenient and accessible. User numbers have grown rapidly after a TrustFabric user’s blog post made it to the top of Ycombinator’s news aggregator last week,” says Botha.
TrustFabric offers Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) services. “Businesses use CRM to manage relationships with their customers, while VRM in turn provides customers with tools to manage relationships with businesses,” explains Botha. “The new service is a natural extension of this ethos as it puts power back in the hands of the customer.”
If you are looking for a way to stop those daily unwanted interruptions, have a look at TrustFabric Connect.
TrustFabric will be submitting a proposal to become the operator of the South African direct marketing Opt-Out registry.
TrustFabric Connect was launched in June and already has about 1000 people using it. It offers an Advanced Opt-out service, which is aware of business relationships and is designed with the Protection of Personal Information Bill in mind.
The TrustFabric Connect services lets people define and share their communication preferences. Users can define how and when a known business should contact them. By configuring how all other (unknown) businesses are allowed to contact them they can opt-out of direct marketing.
TrustFabric is built on VRM principles which aims to give customers control over their personal information. A VRM design also facilitates direct relationships between businesses and their customers rather than the traditional opt-out filters which are usually designed to block 3rd party direct marketing services like out-sourced call centres and bulk text message marketing operations.
