2014-11-26
TALLINN - Former Journalismfund.eu grantee Piret Reiljan and several colleagues at Estonian business news site www.aripaev.ee published an article about a website where unlisted personal mobile phone numbers are published with full names of their owners.
The site, www.whocall.info presents mobile numbers from all over the world with owners’ names. One can search by phone numbers: entering a number with the international dialing code (such as 372 in Estonia) will prompt the programme to produce the name of the owner of the number. The site does not recognise all numbers, but it recognises quite a few indeed.
For example, the article’s author found many numbers of high-ranking politicians, including Estonian prime minister Mr Taavi Rõivas.
Well-known internet research specialist Paul Myers, who works for the BBC, commented on the news: "What a find. Even my mobile number is listed there.“
The site does not perform the opposite search: it does not provide numbers of persons if one searches by name, so one has to previously know the number to get the owner’s name. Even so, it is scary to imagine that the search could also be made to work the other way around. It is not known how all these personal number and names might be used. All we know is that it provides numbers, which have been unlisted by their owners and which are not published anywhere.
The site has been registered at the end of October this year by US company Godaddy.com LLC, the world’s largest domain name registrar. Who is behind whocall.info is not known. The site itself does not provide any contact information besides the name Whocall Ltd.
The original Estonian article on Aripäev can be found here.
