DMA launches TPS app for consumers
Melanie May | 10 August 2017 | News
The DMA has launched an app to help consumers avoid unwanted calls.
TPS Protect has been developed by the DMA in partnership with First Orion and is available as both a free app on Google Play and App Store, and with a subscription for additional features. As well as helping users to avoid unwanted calls, they can use it to register their mobile number with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and register complaints about nuisance or scam calls.
The basic TPS Protect app screens incoming calls so helping users decide whether or not answer, and lets users look up and report numbers. TPS Protect Subscribed is also available for 99p a month following a 60-day free trial, and offers additional features including enabling users to block entire categories of calls, and divert nuisance calls to voicemail.
With the app, every incoming call is given a Trust Score, an indicator created to help users work out who is calling and whether they want to answer for incoming calls, with every nuisance and scam call that is blocked, reported or complained about in the app helping to determine the Trust Score for that number.
Users can add numbers to their personal Blocked List to ensure they no longer receive calls from these numbers, and create an Approved List for calls they never want to miss. Custom settings allow users to tailor the types of call they are happy to receive, for example blocking the majority of unwanted calls by setting their Trust Score to 5, but still receiving calls from specific groups, such as ‘Charities’.
John Mitchison, Head of Preference Services, Compliance and Legal at the DMA, said:
“TPS Protect is an app for your phone that rates incoming calls using information from consumers. Each rating helps callers decide how trusted an unfamiliar call could be. When scam calls get reported, their trust score drops.”
Robert Baker, European MD at First Orion added:
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“Unlike other call blocking apps, TPS Protect does not access your phone contacts and never will. We’ve launched the app with data we have collected over several months of testing and the protection will get better for every person that downloads and uses the app.”
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.