For months, Ariel and Jasmine have pestered me to write about the PrivacyStar app for cellphones.
I know they sound like names of characters in a Disney movie, but actually Ariel and Jasmine are two publicists who send a steady stream of email news releases. Over and over, they promise that PrivacyStar can protect people from annoying telemarketing calls, scammers, debt collectors and other violators of the Do Not Call list.
Sounds too good to be true. I asked my Watchdog associate Marina Trahan Martinez to look into the company’s operations and determine if the app is worth buying. (A one-time $4.99 charge for iPhones and $2.99 per month for Android phones.)
Her research raised several red flags. Two of the company’s top executives are former execs at Acxiom, the highly secretive data collection company that keeps zillions of bytes of data on millions of Americans and sells that information to retailers and others willing to pay for it.
Both Acxiom and PrivacyStar are based in Conway, Ark. Charles Morgan was CEO of Acxiom before he left. He is now CEO of First Orion, the parent company of PrivacyStar. Jeff Stalnaker, the PrivacyStar founder and current CEO, was division president at Acxiom.
What does this mean? Two guys who made names for themselves at a company that collects secretive information on American consumers leave that company and form an enterprise that goes in the opposite direction. Snoops become anti-snoops?
Another red flag: News releases from Ariel and Jasmine insist that PrivacyStar sends more complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about debt collectors and telemarketing than anyone else. They even claim that more people complain to the FTC through PrivacyStar than through the FTC website itself. (The FTC says it doesn’t have easily verifiable data on that claim.)
A final red flag? The app’s terms and conditions allow the company to collect personal information including name, address, phone, email address, credit card information, mobile device information including “unique device identifier,” marketing interests and “demographic information such as interests and ZIP code.”
The policy also gives the company permission to share this information with third parties.
Sounds a lot like the information Acxiom collects. Is this privacy app actually a snoop app? A creative way to collect more personal information about its customers under the guise of privacy?
Stalnaker, the PrivacyStar CEO, tells The Watchdog in a phone interview that all of those potential problems are nothing to worry about. Our red flags are false flags, he says.
The CEO says that Privacy-Star has no ties with Acxiom, does not collect personal data on customers other than a phone number and shares none of it with data brokers. He promises that the privacy app does its best to actually protect its customers’ privacy.
For instance, the company does not take credit card information from customers. Instead, for Android phones, payment is made through Google Wallet, a separate pay system. For iPhone customers, payment goes through iTunes.
One problem with the app is that it works on Android phones, Stalnaker says, but its powers are limited on iPhones. Apple has strict rules about call blocking. Android phones are more open. That’s why there’s a price difference for the two types of phones.
For Android phone owners, PrivacyStar offers a real-time Caller ID system, reverse phone lookup for annoying numbers and Text ID (which is similar to Caller ID but for text messages).
The best-sounding Android feature is that PrivacyStar collects phone numbers of known scammers and debt collectors and blocks those from coming to your phone.
Stalnaker says, “Every day we’re tracking what numbers are used by scammers. When we identify that a phone number is used for this, we block those automatically for our user base. If you have our app on your phone, we block the known scammers.”
The iPhone version — called Lookup+ by PrivacyStar — can’t block because of iPhone restrictions. But both versions offer a feature that allows customers to send the phone number of a scammer directly to the FTC complaint website. That’s how PrivacyStar can claim that it provides so many complaints, Stalnaker says.
Of course, customers can do their own reverse phone lookups using whitepages.com for free. And as you probably know, not all scammers’ numbers are available through Caller ID. So PrivacyStar doesn’t always find the identity of the caller, although Stalnaker says the company can research numbers beyond Caller ID.
You don’t need an app to complain to the FTC either.
I can’t vouch for the app because, as an iPhone user, I couldn’t test its best features. But it seems this app might help Android phone users who are harassed by debt collectors, who want to block calls from a specific person or who want to cut down the number of calls from known scammers.
Note that the app is not available for land lines.
Maybe now Jasmine and Ariel will leave The Watchdog alone and give me some privacy.
Coming Sunday: The Mafia in Dallas County.
Staff writer Marina Trahan Martinez contributed to this report.
Follow Dave Lieber on Twitter at @Dave Lieber.