Telephone Number Harvesting? [closed]

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I am just completing my mobile website, and I was about to put a <a href="tel:"> links, when I thought about telphone number harvesting, in a similar capacity to email harvesting.

This may not be the biggest issue now, but as mobile websites get more popular this is clearly going to be a target, with the biggest issue being it's not going to be easy to ignore spam phone call like it is with email. This is probably a big issue now!

Has anyone heard of this type of telephone harvesting, although not that much different to the ways company already get your numbers, except this doesn't really have a no call list you can join.

I'm not saying this doesn't already exist now, I've had a few calls from the odd "SEO company", to which I laugh at being a web developer. But this is clearly going to make it easier to harvest numbers.

Has anyone got any thoughts on solutions to prevent this, like the js obfuscation for emails? OR is it going to turn in to one of those do it at your own risk situations, like mailto: ?

Update:

Is there a way to obfuscate the phone number? or is this just something to be avoided?

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Telephone number harvesting is possible anyway without the tel: attribute. It's not that difficult to write a parser to extract phone numbers from plain/html text. It's much, much less of an issue than email harvesting as it is so cheap to send an email. A phone call costs money and takes time. Plus of course I've never ever heard of this being an issue to anyone. So I really wouldn't worry about it.

If you are still concerned about it, I suggest you read up on email obfuscation techniques. Very briefly these are:

• Scramble the data server-side, and decode it in javascript (but what happens if js is off?)
• Use an image
• Hide behind a captcha (requires user intervention, is a pain)

And of course none of these are bullet proof anyway, a determined harvester can work round all of these. And don't forget human slave farms in the far east.

tl;dr: honestly, it's not worth it.

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Not sure what you are looking for exactly, and I don't know about obfuscating phone numbers, but you could try a CAPTCHA (although that wouldn't work well for some users, and is annoying to almost all users) and/or using a phone forwarding service like Google Voice, which would allow blacklisting numbers, or pulling the plug on all phone calls if it becomes a problem.

I don't think it will become a big problem for you, as phone calls are as cheap or easy as an email message, and it isn't as easy to hop phone numbers as it is to switch email addresses, so it might be possible to keep up with blacklisting numbers.