How Does Twilio Protect Customers?

Twilio has always been a company that focuses on creating opportunities for our developer community. This can be seen from our initial launch of the 5 verbs which enabled developers to start building the first cloud based communication applications, to our most recent announcement of Twilio Connect which enables developers to not have to worry about usage based billing. As our business has grown, though, we have also continued to invest in a number of areas that don’t always necessarily manifest themselves as new features for our developer community. Evan Cooke, Twilio’s CTO, spoke at TwilioCon about some of the internals of Twilio which ensures high availability, scaling, robustness and continuous improvement. All critical areas for ensuring Twilio delivers a great service to our developers.

Another area where we have invested in is how we protect customers from unsolicited messaging. As a network provider, Twilio takes very seriously our role in maintaining the quality of communication in the SMS ecosystem. We see this as core to our mission of enabling new powerful communication applications to be built on top of existing telecom infrastructure.

To this end we have launched a number of features without much fanfare in the last year aimed at protecting consumers and giving developers opportunities to deliver SMS in a mechanism that is consistent with the best practices present in the industry. Here are just a few things we have done:

• Short Code Support– Twilio added support for short codes in July this year to enable developers who wish to do mobile marketing and volume messaging through Twilio. We repeatedly heard requests from our community for options on how to do marketing and volume messaging through Twilio, so we decided to add it as a service offering.
• Pro-active Filtering– at Twilio we have also invested in smart filters that analyze messaging traffic, flagging accounts that are engaging in spam-like activity and following up with developers to ensure compliance with our Terms of Service.
• Best Practices Support– All new Twilio customers, even those performing transactional or person to person messaging over phone numbers will have support for START, STOP & HELP enabled on their account by default. This ensures that a customer that no longer wants to receive messages from a Twilio number will be able to respond with STOP and block a number from sending them an SMS in the future.
• Education- We have also taken an active role in educating our developers about the SMS ecosystem, best practice guidelines and by answering questions. We talked about SMS at TwilioCon and will continue to provide more resources for the community to ensure they can build great solutions.