> At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.
This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem. Ignoring the actual scam part, the companies terminating the calls (that is: your phone provider) is making money on two ends: they get paid by the originator, and they get paid by the consumer they're delivering the call to (you). The telco originating the call is getting paid by the spammer. Spam is profitable for everybody.
> I think that we’ll be able to push the genie a long way back into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone. It’ll be a surprise that it’s a robocall—instead of the expectation that it’s a robocall.
I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention. I almost never answer my phone for that reason, not just because of spam. I'd just rather interact asynchronously via text or email, without interrupting whatever I happen to be doing. If I'm able I'll reply quickly, and I'm happy to switch to a synchronous phone call if it makes sense (I'd still prefer that over dozens of back-and-forth texts where nuance is tricky and it's easier to misunderstand each other).
It's at the point if my spouse or most close family/friends actually phone me, my reaction is "Oh no, what's wrong?"
> This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem.
I'm skeptical. I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network. Like I would definitely consider switching carriers if one of them genuinely solved the problem. Given the amount of mobile network advertising I see, there's gotta be way more money in actually fixing this and gaining new users, than there is in getting a couple fractions of a cent per completed call.
It's not even a hard problem to fix. Just have calls sourced internationally set to default-deny for every account. If a user actually wants to receive internationally-sourced calls, they can turn it on. The number of people turning it on would be so small, spammers wouldn't bother at all anymore. Then, prosecute anyone sending spam calls from within the US (I assume we are already doing this). Boom, you've solved the phone spam problem.
Now someone go implement it so I can start paying you for your superior product.
> I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network.
If you genuinely had free choice of multiple otherwise similar quality options, which is not the case in all markets/areas.
Also, I wouldn't put it past the networks to promise to try to eliminate cold calls (to make it look like they are on your side), make a perfunctory amount of effort (the minimum to be able to say they are making an attempt), and still make the money they can from the other side.
Make the "report as spam" button or notification cause the spammer or their sponsor to incur a $0.01 charge payable to the mobile provider. The money would be a rounding error for false accusations, but would decimate anyone sending massive spam calls.
$0.10 - but you have to actually pick up the call before the "report as spam" button is available. Add a button which is "Hang up and report as spam", and put that button away from the regular hang up button, so it doesn't often get hit accidentally.
Also, if the monthly bill is less than $1 in spam charges, then the charges should be dropped. Spam charges aren't intended for one-off annoying calls.
I want to work on a micro payment system like this but for email. The email is encrypted but not for privacy, for "proof of readability", the key is somehow decrypted off the blockchain only after, say, $0.05 is sent to the recipient. That starts a time delay that auto refunds the micro payment UNLESS spam button is pressed on the client. Then the nickel is claimed. People mailing back and forth will do so for free, because clicking reply will refund the nickel. In theory recipients could set their own price to talk to them. Coins would be real and absolutely redeemable for USD or other coin. To be clear, email content is NOT on the blockchain.
Few problems:
- have to pay upfront to send messages.
- might have problems with liquidity finding traders to redeem with
- Major mail providers such as Gmail may block forwarded encrypted content "for security"
- would require add-on client to decrypt
- people are sick of hearing about shit coins
- need very low gas fee shitcoin
- if shitcoin server goes down, email goes down
I suppose you could do this in a cashless way and just request tokens from a miner. And if you ask for too many, too fast, you get denied or have to pay the miner. The idea would be to distribute them sparsely among people who don't send many messages. Maybe the shitcoin could somehow enforce not holding too many send tokens.
I like this and would pay for such a system. It doesn’t need to use blockchain though, a normal escrow system would work. Everyone who signs up puts a dollar in escrow. If you send an email to your contact it’s free. If you send outside your contacts it costs a penny, but the recipient can return the penny to you if they want.
This makes it prohibitively expensive to send low value email, free to send high value email, and slightly expensive to send “probably valuable” email.
I am a cynic, and I believe the real reason that nothing is being done, is because telecom companies love robocallers (they make a lot of money, and don't get bothered too much for customer service -I saw the same thing with spam emailers and fraudsters. Hosting providers love them, because they buy a lot of product, and don't ask for much customer service).
I also think that politicians don't want to address it, because they use them, and people really don't like political robocalls, because they can be downright noxious.
> I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention.
Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I have adopted the following approach that ensures have control over 95% of the interruptions:
- I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS
- Focus mode is on 100% of the time.
- I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from people in my contact list).
To your last point, the people I am actually interested in talking to only call if something is too important/time sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.
It's lousy for the elderly, who really suffer from this. Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system, don't really use texting, and expect things to work. So our decision to allow the phone system to descend into fraud is really harmful to them. I dread to think what our society will look like by the time I'm really old.
> Many older people spent their lives with a working phone system
It's shocking how quickly the phone system has just up and vanished, replaced by a simulation of a phone system running over the internet, with little wireless supercomputers taking the place of the landline phone's 19th Century technology. Oh, pockets of the old circuit-switched voice network still exist, but they're rapidly being decommissioned.
It didn't hit me until one of my dad's friends called him from an unfamiliar number - because he was forced to get a cell phone for the first time in his life. My parents are on a VoIP service with their old phone number, and it works nicely, but it still depends on working internet - a reversal from when getting TO the internet required working phone service.
The simulation would be fine if we hadn’t abandoned it to scammers so that some two-bit VoIP services could make a buck. The result is understandable to young people: you literally cannot trust any incoming call that isn’t from a person you know very well —- because the only people calling your phone are people who want to do you harm or defraud you. And they call constantly. The worst part is that thanks to AI voice impersonation, even the “accept calls from people you know” heuristic isn’t trustworthy anymore. How do you explain to someone who spent 80 years trusting a communication medium that we’ve decided to let criminals run wild with it, and we think that’s fine?
This doesn’t work if you’re on-call (and don’t have a very specific set of numbers that calls could be received from), run a business, looking for work or awaiting vendor calls.
Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the work phone while I’m on-call? Technically I should.
Also doesn’t help that callerids get forged to be similar to your own number, which looks like the corporate block of phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them as likely fraud).
> they get paid by the consumer they’re delivering the call to
That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have the phone so that I can receive spam calls. If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.
Depending on your plan, you may be either paying for minutes or they're using up your allotment, which in some cases means you could end up paying a premium rate for going over. If you're on an "unlimited" plan, this bit is irrelevant but at the same time, the marginal cost of delivering calls is essentially zero once the network capacity exists.
If you're roaming on another carrier's network, I'm not sure how the economics work there, but I suspect the other carrier gets paid regardless.
The user could be from a country where paying to receive phone-calls is unknown. From some brief Wikipedia research, this is only a common model in the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiving_party_pays)
Only problem I see is that now that everyone is ignoring calls and focusing on text messages, there's now a lot of spam text messages and that is only going to grow.
Does anyone know what "Delete and report junk" actually does on iOS? Is it a placebo button like "Close elevator door" and "Push button to cross street," or does Apple actually do something useful with those reports?
I have my suspicions that "Delete and report junk" is about as effective as marking email as "junk" in the Apple mail client. That is, the Apple mail client will happily drop junk mail into your inbox no matter how many times you mark mail from foo@bar.com as junk. And yet I have to go dig in the Junk folder to find the shipping confirmation from orders@company_you've_heard_of.com
> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention
I agree, and the fact that there are so many other things demanding my attention is crazy making.
If I had to guess, a few generations ago this was probably a complaint about the advent of telephones, even without robocallers and telemarketers. Now that spam has reduced the signal to noise ratio, it’s amusing to see this pop back up.
Looking at that article, it’s pretty obvious that the author is experiencing something like severe anxiety (as are some people close to me who share this aversion). While we should be compassionate and accommodating of such people, there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind), and we shouldn’t force them to only communicate the way the anxious ones prefer.
The telephone already supports two-way “consent” - it doesn’t answer itself and some people choose at their own risk to never answer it.
Edit: my point is it’s already not a demand, it’s a notice: somewhere out there, someone thinks either you know something they should hear ASAP, or vice versa. What you do with that is up to you.
That's a rather apt description for the feelings that telephones cause.
> there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind)
Voice messages. All modern asynchronous messaging services support them.
> it doesn’t answer itself
It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep. For basically no reason whatsoever. Usually because some asshole wants to pitch his products.
As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
> It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep.
Isn't this a configuration issue? iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios.
> As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
Characterizing an unsolicited phone call as wrong or rude seems backwards to me. I don't see fault being the caller's but rather the recipient's for not availing themselves of the resources at their disposal to control access to their attention.
Isn't that a bit like saying if your home is broken into, it's your fault for not having better locks?
I would agree that if you want better outcomes, you should learn about and use the mechanisms built into your phone to reduce distractions, but telling people it's their fault that others are treating them with rudeness seems a bit much.
No. It's a "people think phone calls are the most important things in the world and they override all other concerns" issue. It's quite visible in the design and implementation of phones and smartphones.
> iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios.
They do not allow calls to be completely disabled. Even with all those configurations applied, all my Android phones still show a notification that someone is calling me and that calls were missed. The notifications cannot be disabled. Phone still manages to be an absolute pain even when completely silenced. I got two of those notifications while writing this comment. Literally right now.
The voice mail notification was the worst. It was impossible to get rid of. I tried killing the phone apps via debugger and they still came back somehow. Would not go away until I listened to all the voice mails in full. Of course companies would leave ads in the voice mail. Words can't describe how much I hated that thing. Mercifully I managed to turn voice mail off at the phone company itself after performing some arcane dialing incantations that I don't even care to remember.
> I don't see fault being the caller's
Well I do. Callers think it's OK to interrupt others. That's presumptuous and rude in of itself. The same attitude of an advertiser.
It sounds like you want a tablet w/ a data plan and not a smartphone. I don't know who makes one in the form factor of a phone (though, to be fair, phones are crazy big now and almost pass for tablets). I find that the market serves my desires very poorly, too.
I don't regard people who are call the same way you do. That's just a difference in our experience and outlook. I don't think calling someone is inherently rude. Some people who call me have rude intentions (advertisers, scammers), but I've done what I can to insure I'm not bothered by those people while allowing the people who I want to share my attention with (family, friends, paying Customers) to reach me asynchronously.
I can heartily share being frustrated with the whole "phone" product category. I think phones should be portable general purpose personal computers, completely under the control of their owners first and "phones" second (or third, or fourth). The market seems to disagree (and lots of people make special pleadings about how "phones" shouldn't be under the control of their owners because "they're phones" and not "computers"-- much to my frustration).
I look at it this way: Imagine a world where the concept of a telephone never existed. We all have these portable hand-held computers, but nobody's ever experienced a "phone" before. Now suddenly an app developer invents a way for "anyone in the world to anonymously contact your device, without your consent, have that device (by default) interrupt what it's doing, (by default) ring and/or buzz, (by default) pop up a full-screen modal over what you are doing, and if you press the button, that anonymous person is able to activate your device's speaker and microphone.
I don't think this intrusive app would pass either major store's guidelines. This kind of device takeover/intrusion would be totally unacceptable to many (most?) users.
But, since we already have a concept of what a "phone" is and have gotten used to it, culturally we let it slide.
You can rest assured that my phones are well managed. As well as phones can possibly be managed. Their volumes are set to zero, they are muted and their ringtones are explicity set to silence on top of that.
Disabling calls altogether can't be done. You bet I looked for that knob. Calls are literally baked into the OS. I even asked the phone company to turn off calling. Nope. So I have to live with constant useless annoying notifications that some bot is trying to call me whenever I'm actively using my phone. Welp. At least I managed to turn off voice mail. That was an especially horrible advertising vector.
Only reason I even have active phone numbers is WhatsApp. Technically, I only need SMS for the verification codes. Explaining that to the phone company is futile though.
Anyway, this only fixes part of the problem. Every other person in my life carries a phone with them. Older folks even have landlines. All those phones ring. A lot.
I don't generally make a habit of "configurating" other people's phones, for obvious reasons. I've tried convince them. It didn't work. They're OK with being routinely woken up by useless phone calls every single day because someone somewhere might one day need to call them on that phone to relay important news or something. It has a visible, measurable impact on their quality of life but they refuse to get rid of the phone. I think that's incredibly inhumane but it can't be helped.
That's part of it, yes. Also the fact that existing software was apparently built with the assumption that you always want to receive calls, that they are important, so important they can't be disabled or ignored.
More fundamentally, I have a problem with interrupting synchronous communication, and especially the cultural acceptance of it. As I noted in my original comment.
>> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention
What can you do if you don't want to block unknown numbers, e.g. you get a call from a hospital about your injured relative, but you have blocked all unknown numbers
Its kind of funny--I'm the exact opposite. I don't have any messaging services other than email--no twitter, FB, WhatsApp, etc.--and SMS is silenced. If you want to get ahold of me, you either email or call. But I get your point that phones should allow the disabling of the phone app for those that dont want to receive calls. It is kind a historic memory that makes them default and always on.
I love getting calls! I love hearing a human who actually wants to talk about something! Voices are much more pleasant than flat text. Voices have inflection and emotion and you can hear people laugh at jokes and anecdotes!
Via text things like sarcasm are harder to recognize and it's not obvious how the person on the other end actually feels about what they're writing about - which makes some text conversations very confusing without lots of clarification.
In a way, it's like getting a hand-written letter. It's more effort but it also feels more genuine and less sanitized than a text.
I used to incessantly get the Car Warranty scam call, but that's been gone for years at this point. Now essentially the only calls I get are from real people.
If I'm really busy or stressed or whatever (or at work), that's what voicemail is for. Then a reply can go out via phone, text, email or whatever.
An idea which works for me: the 5 close contacts are set to buzzing, everything else is on silent thus has to wait for when I feel like looking at the phone. I also have the answering robot on for those who really have something to tell me (the few). This makes for a quiet day.
For a few months in 2008, i was renting a house just over the area code boundary. I switched carriers just before porting became a thing. I still have that area code, and the only other person I know with a number in that area code is my spouse. I used to get many calls a day from that same area code (trying to appear as a local call) even though I now live about 2100 miles away. iPhones are great at sending them directly to voicemail if they are not in your email, address book, or recent calls, and I get one voicemail every few weeks that is mostly static now.
There is a tri-county area. The poor county that few people live, the working class county, the professional class county.
At one point I realized that myself and my 2 coworkers had the working class area code on a phone number list we created... and we were in the professional county doing business. I'm not sure if it was mental insecurity, but I felt ashamed that my entire team was from the working class area. The fact that we were all 'top of our class' didn't matter. Money didn't matter, we probably were making more than the client since we were profit centers.
I need a new phone number. Seriously, in my area its judgeworthy.
If there is a possibility that this might impact your business, even a small one, then it is probably worth getting a new phone number and I would encourage you to do so.
So much of business is based on perception and you don’t want to give clients any reason to doubt you.
The best thing I ever did was get a phone number from another state. I have a Hawaii number from the couple years I lived there. Even better is because it’s such a transitory area, most of the friends I had in Hawaii had numbers from out of state. Because of that any time I see an 808 number, I know very confidently it’s a spam call.
In Czechia I get about 10 a year. Hardly what I'd call a big problem... My grandparents in canada get about 10 a day. My grandpa in the us got like 10 an hour before he died, many time live humans who knew his name and that he was an old man in a nursing home....
This exact claim gets made in every single robocall conversation on HN. I've never looked, maybe it's always the same people making it? Pretty soon someone else from Germany will be along to tell you about how many robocalls they get. And someone from the US will mention they also get no robocalls.
And as an American who lives in the UK, I always make the exact same response, and I'm continually surprised that people still don't understand.
In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. So sending out a million text messages costs almost nothing, because the expensive part is borne by the receivers.
In the UK and EU, the person sending the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. This price is defined by a government regulator is owed by the sender's network to the owner of the cell tower.
So if some random person sends a text to me, and I'm using an O2 tower, that person has to pay O2 something like £0.20; meaning to send a million text messages would cost you £200k.
The result is that I do get spam messages, but they're always far more directed: normally organizations that I've actually interacted with in the past. Sending a message to a thousand previous customers is a lot more cost-effective (I presume) than sending a message to tens of millions of random phone numbers.
Ironically, the absolute easiest way to solve the US's spam call/text problem is actually market-based: make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver.
> In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone.
Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
> The result is that I do get spam messages
Ah, but I'm in the US and I don't get any spam texts :). I do get some robocalls though. It's not an easy to solve problem.
> make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver
I think the complication here is that the source of the calls and texts are not other mobile phones. They're coming onto the network via SIP. The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used. I can send an email to make a text appear on my phone, and this is a feature I have used occasionally -- how do I bill for that?
> Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
Whether you pay per-SMS or whether you pay bulk for "unlimited" calls and texts, you're still paying for the path from the tower to your phone. Calling a cell phone in the US is the same price as calling a landline.
In the UK, it's possible to buy a phone that has no outgoing minutes or texts. This is useful because people can still call you. In fact, at some point there was a provider that would pay you a "cut" on every SMS or phone call you received. And calling a mobile phone -- whether you're calling from a landline or another mobile phone -- is more expensive than calling a landline.
Which is almost certainly one of the key problems with implementing such a system in the US: in the UK and Europe, mobile phone numbers look obviously different than landline numbers, so you know ahead of time that the call is going to cost you more. In the US, they look the same, so you'd never know how much you would get charged.
> The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used
If you call my mobile phone, my mobile operator will be paid for that call one way or another; I'm pretty sure neither they nor any of the companies in between your phone provider and mine are going to give it away for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Which means the charge-back mechanism is already in place; it's just not used in the US.
Normally it's American exceptionalism — assuming the USA is better than every other country. I think this is the first time I've seen someone assuming that since America has a problem, other countries must have it too.
> assuming the USA is better than every other country
Do you really see that happening? "America Bad" is the dominant theme online, including on HN. I see -way- more "gosh I don't understand why America sucks so bad, it's totally perfect over here in Europe" than I see Americans claiming that the US is automatically superior. I feel like in the US we're playing defense way more often, trying to explain misunderstandings and ignorance about how things work here.
To be clear, there are definitely things that work better in Europe. But there are things that the US does pretty well too. Nobody likes to hear that.
No, it's true, I was surprised to get a robocall a few months ago, because it was the first ever (I think) and I have had my number since >10 years now. It's just not a thing here, I've never heard anyone complain about robocalls.
It's only a couple of years ago that I learned that "robocalls", which I'd seen mentioned for, what, a decade or more?, are actually fully robotic and not just a telemarketing department using an autodialer for more or less cold calls.
That's how weird this phenomenon is to a european. To me it was a solid "WTF?" moment. Since then I've wondered why I've never heard about US:ians tracking down these operations and destroying them.
I believe (historically at least), local calls in america were free - setting up a robocaller could take advantage of this - the only cost was energy. In the UK/EU the same calls would cost the robocaller money.
Similarly, I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay to receive them. Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
SMS has been free for most people in the US for a long time now. For a while Europe was cheaper, but things have changed over the last 20 years, and they will continue to change. When SMS was cheaper in the EU, voice calls were vastly cheaper in the US, so when the EU would use SMS, the US would just make a voice call (at the time the US spent 2x as much for phone service, but used the phone 5x as much - I'm going to call that cheaper but you can read the numbers several ways).
Robo calls make sense in the US in part because we used the phone more (remember historic), and in part because "everyone" spoke English and so you could ignore language and reach a lot more people.
> I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay to receive them.
That has not been true in many years. Most people have unlimited everything. Cost conscious consumers do opt for plans with limits, but that's on data, not calls and/or SMS.
> Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
The 2 scenarios seem to be:
1) SMS is included in the service. This makes sense. Original SMS were 0-cost to provide; they rode on existing control traffic.
2) Honest people pay per SMS. Spammers don't. As ever, this disproportionately effects honest poor people.
I don't have data, but it seems plausible that niche languages receive geometrically fewer attacks. I'm US, and looking at my call history 3/11 of the most recent inbound calls were spam which was correctly captured by google and I never saw it.
Consider yourself lucky. I too am in Germany and and I get calls on almost a daily basis. Robo and otherwise. Same with WhatsApp messages. I have my number for close to 20 years now though.
Unless this gets regulated Telcos will continue to enjoy their profits.
a few years ago i received a week of robo calls after renewing a domain lease. don't remember which registrar but i do remember that my number was redacted in the whois record and concluded that their process must be leaky. (also german)
"At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests."
I hope the modest amount of money it took to bribe the FCC commissioners is worth it to them. The FCC allowed 10 or 20 sociopaths to make modest amounts of money while ruining a communication network used by billions.
Because of the legal situation. In Germany commercial cold calling without consent is flat out banned and heavily fined. (up to tens of thousands in fines). I'm also German and had I think, one robocall in 20 years.
Why hasn’t STIR/SHAKEN fixed the problem? I thought those protocols were supposed to be the TLS of the phone system and eliminate spoofed caller id. It would be nice if, when a number appeared on caller id there was also an A, B, or C to indicate the signing level.
STIR/SHAKEN doesn't prevent spoofing. It can verify in certain cases when a call is not spoofed but it's fairly limited and almost entirely mobile-to-mobile phone calls. It requires IP based network connectivity end-to-end, which just isn't possible in the US. If a call gets routed through a rural network and switches back to TDM, it will drop all STIR/SHAKEN data. It will still take years for US infrastructure to be entirely IP-based. Robocallers sign their calls with STIR/SHAKEN just fine, the originators do this for them, so it's not going to be a strong deterrent in my opinion.
Devices support attestation level A display (green or grey check marks in your call logs designate this). If you haven't seen that check mark, then you probably haven't seen many A-level attested calls to your device. As far as device manufacturers go, they only care about A-level attestation, which makes sense as it has full traceback capability.
Anecdata, but I've gotten less outright scam calls this past year.
These days, it's just local shady companies. Think: "Expired Vacation" package timeshare pitches and lately callers asking if I have Medicare A and B.
The Medicare stuff, I assume is some kind of fraud, but the kind where they talk you into being a customer for some service so they can bilk the government for that service (which they may or may not deliver). Fraud, but a more insidious kind - not unlike the auto warranty sales calls (which I seem to no longer get either).
So mostly lead generation for shady domestic companies is what I seem to get. You can always tell, because when you ask the name of the company they hang up on you.
For me, it's political texts from Illinois, which I moved away from 6 years ago. They seem to be doing this thing where you can unsubscribe from a given campaign, but when some other politician wants to do a campaign they will acquire that list without scrubbing the optouts.
I was led to believe that this is technically allowed so I've been using an app (buzzkill) to junk any text containing the name of a politician.
Unsurprisingly, lawmakers make laws which excerpt them from obnoxious behavior which is not allowed for non-lawmakers.
It's funny though - I live in IL as well, and don't get many political texts.
What I do get matches the ratio of political spam I get across all of my various email accounts: It's 90% one party, and 10% or less the other. A fair amount of it doesn't mention party affiliation, and tries to copy the color scheme and design of the other state party even on their websites (which is pretty brazen). FWIW: I'm not registered with any party at any level and have never signed up for any political newsletter AFAIK.
> I've gotten less outright scam calls this past year.
Same, close to zero if not zero (I might have received one late last year or early this year). I do also try to make a bloody nuisance of myself; I'm snoot sure if they have some internal denylist, but I try my hardest to get onto it.
Why not just give up on the legacy telephone system?
Decades ago we had dialup internet - a service entirely unrelated to the telephone system, built atop the existing telephone infrastructure. The US or EU or whoever could simply design a new service built atop that existing infrastructure.
Telecom companies could double as Certificate Authorities for the new system, providing and signing certificates used to authenticate both sides of a call and encrypt traffic between them. It doesn't even have to be limited to calls. They could also support text or even arbitrary data. It could be a revolutionary new platform for instant communication, separate from the internet and backed by major nations across the world. And the best part is the infrastructure is already built!
Or they could keep playing cat-and-mouse games with spammers for all of eternity.
This would break and complicate things. Make things incompatible. Look, we already have WhatsApp and it's still got spam. Granted, only message spam, but still. A new system might not solve the spam problem, but break and complicate a lot of things.
My landline provider offers a "call-control" feature. When someone calls, if the caller number has not been accepted before, a voice asks the caller to enter a randomly selected digit. Only after this has been correctly done is the call permitted to go through. Probably deflatable, but it has eliminated my robocalls. The only downside is that legitimate robocalls (eg: doctor's reminder) might be blocked if I have not whitelisted the number.
Simple solution, and I am surprised at how well it works.
The interviewee discusses why robocalls weren't reduced decades ago.
Well, regulations are really, really tough for a couple of reasons. One is, it’s a bureaucratic, slow-moving process.
There's also this notion of regulatory capture. At the FCC, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.
The regulatory capture of the FCC has been discussed for 20 years - just not by major news orgs (or telco industry press, or most tech press).
I see a lot of calls for being able to block an area code. That does not seem to be useful to me, living in a major metro area lots of legit calls (doctors office etc) share the same area code as spammers/political organizations.
What I think would be useful is to be able to block based on incoming carrier. During the last election season, most calls were coming from various VoIP services (Twilio, etc), none from normal retail cell carriers. If I could block an entire carrier who specializes in providing text/voice marketing services, problem solved? Legit business users of those services would hopefully migrate away to more ethical providers when their calls start failing to connect.
I took the nuclear option of signing up for a new number in a area I don't live or know anyone and use "numbershield" on ios to block the entire area code
now I get almost zero spam calls and virtually every call which comes through is legitimate
My wife was at dinner with a bunch of other women the other night. Of a party of about 15, at least 12 of them had stories of their parents being scammed for a large amount of money. Even the scams that start online end up leveraging the phone system in some way. In total, the single table she was sitting at had lost over $10 million dollars to scammers - almost $1m per person. It's sickening.
The phone system is entirely broken. It comes down to economics- there's zero cost to make millions of calls, so your economic benefit formula is obvious- you can make millions of calls because one of them will pay you back mega-$$$. There is no accountability and no way to automatically filter out spam (as we do with email, although to be honest, spam filtering isn't great either). I don't know what to do other than to increase the cost to make phone calls in order to address the perverse incentives at work.
Edit: I’m curious about the downvotes. If you follow the links to the automated system that David built (a honeypot for robocallers) you see the top offenders are Medicare and end of life services. That jives with my own experience. So clearly they’re targeting the elderly and therefore the solution is - ask them to look for a little stir/shaken attestation checkmark before answering their phone?
Implement the technology to reliably identify what source country and/or provider a call was initiated from. Give me the ability to choose what countries or providers are allowed to make calls to my phone. Pretty soon the shady providers will go out of business and the rest will try harder to prevent robocalling on their service.
The most important feature of my phone is to make it very difficult to make a phone call to me. Google Pixel is quite good at this with about three layers of protection before a call gets through. It's absurd that we have to take these measures against criminals abusing our communications network.
I answer every call, no matter what the caller ID says. In the last decade, I've probably gotten maybe 10 total spam/robo/telemarketer calls or texts. Strangers like recruiters or doctors never seem to have trouble calling me. My cell phone is posted all over the internet. On my website and my resume. I put it into probably a thousand forms online. What am I doing different? I've had the same Verizon plan and Google voice number the whole time. Are old numbers immune to this problem? Is the Google Voice-Verizon-Samsung combo of built-in spam filters just wildly efficient? I keep hearing about spam calls being an epidemic - are people just rawdogging their cell plan without turning on any spam filtering?
I got a half dozen obvious spam calls in the last 72 hours; by "obvious" I mean they had the same area code+nxx as my number. There's at least another 10+ that were flagged by AT&T as 'telemarketer' or 'probable spam' (according to voicemail, I have many home and car warranties that are about to expire). And there's a handful political calls, which maybe aren't spam technically but I don't want, and will only get worse later in the year.
I don't advertise my phone number, tho I'm sure you could find it if you really want to. If you've really only gotten 10 spams in the last decade, I question whether we are living on the same planet.
>I question whether we are living on the same planet.
I feel the same way when I see a friend ignore a call. I am curious what the difference is. What filters do you have in place? As far as I know, here's what I have:
I make political donations to a few officeholders and candidates. I get a seemingly never-ending deluge of text messages from across the country requesting donations. I usually send a "stop" message, but the word is out.
I learned very quickly as a university student that engaging in the political process is heavily punished by the exact people you thought you were trying to help. I have never donated or campaigned again and it took 10 years to get off of all the spam lists.
I envision the app on the phone that implements AI secretary and answers unknown phone numbers on my behalf, and calms down calling party with various measures, with sort of captcha of various degree of offense. This will hold them off until they find a workaround.
The Pixel 8 does this, it's called "Call Screen" and since getting it I never receive unscreened calls from outside my contact list. It's been very nice to have.
I have such an app. It's called RoboBlocker. I used to use a different app called RoboKiller, but recently switched. Both work basically the same way. They automatically block known spammers/scammers and screen the rest.
I'm surprised we don't see this as an issue in politics. Semi-seriously, any presidential candidate that pledged to stamp out robocalls would win a good chunk of goodwill from voters.
Almost 100% of scam calls are run out of India. There is no political will to hold India responsible because they are economically and geopolitically important to the USA.
How would that help? All the spammers spoof the numbers - hell a lot of them even make their spoofed ID just one or two digits off of mine, presumably to make me curious enough to answer.
> How would that help? All the spammers spoof the numbers
Mine don't, it's either from Pakistan or from 2 towns in my country which presumably are the places that provide a forwarding service to them. If I could block +92 and those two towns i currently would get no spam calls.
Also why shouldn't I just be able to block things with a wildcard rather than every individual number.
Every mobile carriers should be required provide all known hops (and eventually block all carriers who do not do this so there are no weak links) so that we can block calls uBlock Origin style or similar. Blocking anything with any non-US hop would work for me.
This, plus the monetary incentives are the root reason it's still a problem. Ignoring the actual scam part, the companies terminating the calls (that is: your phone provider) is making money on two ends: they get paid by the originator, and they get paid by the consumer they're delivering the call to (you). The telco originating the call is getting paid by the spammer. Spam is profitable for everybody.
> I think that we’ll be able to push the genie a long way back into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone. It’ll be a surprise that it’s a robocall—instead of the expectation that it’s a robocall.
I think a different genie is out of the bottle that won't go back in: the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention. I almost never answer my phone for that reason, not just because of spam. I'd just rather interact asynchronously via text or email, without interrupting whatever I happen to be doing. If I'm able I'll reply quickly, and I'm happy to switch to a synchronous phone call if it makes sense (I'd still prefer that over dozens of back-and-forth texts where nuance is tricky and it's easier to misunderstand each other).
It's at the point if my spouse or most close family/friends actually phone me, my reaction is "Oh no, what's wrong?"
I'm skeptical. I think "our network eliminated spam calls" would be a major, major selling point for a mobile network. Like I would definitely consider switching carriers if one of them genuinely solved the problem. Given the amount of mobile network advertising I see, there's gotta be way more money in actually fixing this and gaining new users, than there is in getting a couple fractions of a cent per completed call.
It's not even a hard problem to fix. Just have calls sourced internationally set to default-deny for every account. If a user actually wants to receive internationally-sourced calls, they can turn it on. The number of people turning it on would be so small, spammers wouldn't bother at all anymore. Then, prosecute anyone sending spam calls from within the US (I assume we are already doing this). Boom, you've solved the phone spam problem.
Now someone go implement it so I can start paying you for your superior product.
If you genuinely had free choice of multiple otherwise similar quality options, which is not the case in all markets/areas.
Also, I wouldn't put it past the networks to promise to try to eliminate cold calls (to make it look like they are on your side), make a perfunctory amount of effort (the minimum to be able to say they are making an attempt), and still make the money they can from the other side.
Sort of in competition but happy not to rock the boat.
Also, if the monthly bill is less than $1 in spam charges, then the charges should be dropped. Spam charges aren't intended for one-off annoying calls.
Few problems:
- have to pay upfront to send messages. - might have problems with liquidity finding traders to redeem with - Major mail providers such as Gmail may block forwarded encrypted content "for security" - would require add-on client to decrypt - people are sick of hearing about shit coins - need very low gas fee shitcoin - if shitcoin server goes down, email goes down
I suppose you could do this in a cashless way and just request tokens from a miner. And if you ask for too many, too fast, you get denied or have to pay the miner. The idea would be to distribute them sparsely among people who don't send many messages. Maybe the shitcoin could somehow enforce not holding too many send tokens.
This makes it prohibitively expensive to send low value email, free to send high value email, and slightly expensive to send “probably valuable” email.
I am a cynic, and I believe the real reason that nothing is being done, is because telecom companies love robocallers (they make a lot of money, and don't get bothered too much for customer service -I saw the same thing with spam emailers and fraudsters. Hosting providers love them, because they buy a lot of product, and don't ask for much customer service).
I also think that politicians don't want to address it, because they use them, and people really don't like political robocalls, because they can be downright noxious.
Definitely agree with this. Over the past five or so years I have adopted the following approach that ensures have control over 95% of the interruptions:
- I have "silence unknown callers" enabled in iOS
- Focus mode is on 100% of the time.
- I disable notifications for all apps except for Reminders (interruptions I have configured) and the Phone app (calls from people in my contact list).
To your last point, the people I am actually interested in talking to only call if something is too important/time sensitive to do via text, so this works well. Any other callers will leave a voicemail if it's actually important.
It's shocking how quickly the phone system has just up and vanished, replaced by a simulation of a phone system running over the internet, with little wireless supercomputers taking the place of the landline phone's 19th Century technology. Oh, pockets of the old circuit-switched voice network still exist, but they're rapidly being decommissioned.
It didn't hit me until one of my dad's friends called him from an unfamiliar number - because he was forced to get a cell phone for the first time in his life. My parents are on a VoIP service with their old phone number, and it works nicely, but it still depends on working internet - a reversal from when getting TO the internet required working phone service.
We strongly recommend you reserve your premium slot at the Soylent Green factory today!
Now, do I charge my employer when I get a scam call on the work phone while I’m on-call? Technically I should.
Also doesn’t help that callerids get forged to be similar to your own number, which looks like the corporate block of phone numbers we have. Tho I think the networks have someone cut down on the ease of doing that (or at least tagging them as likely fraud).
That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have the phone so that I can receive spam calls. If they were able to eliminate all spam calls overnight, people wouldn’t cancel their service.
If you're roaming on another carrier's network, I'm not sure how the economics work there, but I suspect the other carrier gets paid regardless.
Are there many people without any phone service?
I agree, and the fact that there are so many other things demanding my attention is crazy making.
If I had to guess, a few generations ago this was probably a complaint about the advent of telephones, even without robocallers and telemarketers. Now that spam has reduced the signal to noise ratio, it’s amusing to see this pop back up.
Needs to end as soon as possible. Calling on the phone is one of the most rude things someone can possibly do.
https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/
Edit: my point is it’s already not a demand, it’s a notice: somewhere out there, someone thinks either you know something they should hear ASAP, or vice versa. What you do with that is up to you.
That's a rather apt description for the feelings that telephones cause.
> there are others who are much better able to communicate using voice than with text (heck, including the blind)
Voice messages. All modern asynchronous messaging services support them.
> it doesn’t answer itself
It sure as hell rings loudly all by itself though. It interrupts. Grabs attention. Demands attention. It wakes people up from their precious sleep. For basically no reason whatsoever. Usually because some asshole wants to pitch his products.
As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
Isn't this a configuration issue? iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios.
> As a person with attention deficit, I consider that to be a form of violence against me and my mind. I will defend myself from it.
Characterizing an unsolicited phone call as wrong or rude seems backwards to me. I don't see fault being the caller's but rather the recipient's for not availing themselves of the resources at their disposal to control access to their attention.
I would agree that if you want better outcomes, you should learn about and use the mechanisms built into your phone to reduce distractions, but telling people it's their fault that others are treating them with rudeness seems a bit much.
No. It's a "people think phone calls are the most important things in the world and they override all other concerns" issue. It's quite visible in the design and implementation of phones and smartphones.
> iOS and Android both have sufficiently nuanced control for do-not-disturb to accommodate a ton of usage scenarios.
They do not allow calls to be completely disabled. Even with all those configurations applied, all my Android phones still show a notification that someone is calling me and that calls were missed. The notifications cannot be disabled. Phone still manages to be an absolute pain even when completely silenced. I got two of those notifications while writing this comment. Literally right now.
The voice mail notification was the worst. It was impossible to get rid of. I tried killing the phone apps via debugger and they still came back somehow. Would not go away until I listened to all the voice mails in full. Of course companies would leave ads in the voice mail. Words can't describe how much I hated that thing. Mercifully I managed to turn voice mail off at the phone company itself after performing some arcane dialing incantations that I don't even care to remember.
> I don't see fault being the caller's
Well I do. Callers think it's OK to interrupt others. That's presumptuous and rude in of itself. The same attitude of an advertiser.
I don't regard people who are call the same way you do. That's just a difference in our experience and outlook. I don't think calling someone is inherently rude. Some people who call me have rude intentions (advertisers, scammers), but I've done what I can to insure I'm not bothered by those people while allowing the people who I want to share my attention with (family, friends, paying Customers) to reach me asynchronously.
I can heartily share being frustrated with the whole "phone" product category. I think phones should be portable general purpose personal computers, completely under the control of their owners first and "phones" second (or third, or fourth). The market seems to disagree (and lots of people make special pleadings about how "phones" shouldn't be under the control of their owners because "they're phones" and not "computers"-- much to my frustration).
I don't think this intrusive app would pass either major store's guidelines. This kind of device takeover/intrusion would be totally unacceptable to many (most?) users.
But, since we already have a concept of what a "phone" is and have gotten used to it, culturally we let it slide.
You're literally complaining about your own inability to manage the devices you own.
If there is any violence here, it's you. You with an active phone number, misconfigurating it, then blathering on about the results to others.
Disabling calls altogether can't be done. You bet I looked for that knob. Calls are literally baked into the OS. I even asked the phone company to turn off calling. Nope. So I have to live with constant useless annoying notifications that some bot is trying to call me whenever I'm actively using my phone. Welp. At least I managed to turn off voice mail. That was an especially horrible advertising vector.
Only reason I even have active phone numbers is WhatsApp. Technically, I only need SMS for the verification codes. Explaining that to the phone company is futile though.
Anyway, this only fixes part of the problem. Every other person in my life carries a phone with them. Older folks even have landlines. All those phones ring. A lot.
I don't generally make a habit of "configurating" other people's phones, for obvious reasons. I've tried convince them. It didn't work. They're OK with being routinely woken up by useless phone calls every single day because someone somewhere might one day need to call them on that phone to relay important news or something. It has a visible, measurable impact on their quality of life but they refuse to get rid of the phone. I think that's incredibly inhumane but it can't be helped.
More fundamentally, I have a problem with interrupting synchronous communication, and especially the cultural acceptance of it. As I noted in my original comment.
>> the expectation you can immediately and synchronously interrupt any person and demand their full attention
> Needs to end as soon as possible.
I love getting calls! I love hearing a human who actually wants to talk about something! Voices are much more pleasant than flat text. Voices have inflection and emotion and you can hear people laugh at jokes and anecdotes!
Via text things like sarcasm are harder to recognize and it's not obvious how the person on the other end actually feels about what they're writing about - which makes some text conversations very confusing without lots of clarification.
In a way, it's like getting a hand-written letter. It's more effort but it also feels more genuine and less sanitized than a text.
I used to incessantly get the Car Warranty scam call, but that's been gone for years at this point. Now essentially the only calls I get are from real people.
If I'm really busy or stressed or whatever (or at work), that's what voicemail is for. Then a reply can go out via phone, text, email or whatever.
There is a tri-county area. The poor county that few people live, the working class county, the professional class county.
At one point I realized that myself and my 2 coworkers had the working class area code on a phone number list we created... and we were in the professional county doing business. I'm not sure if it was mental insecurity, but I felt ashamed that my entire team was from the working class area. The fact that we were all 'top of our class' didn't matter. Money didn't matter, we probably were making more than the client since we were profit centers.
I need a new phone number. Seriously, in my area its judgeworthy.
Although with generous government subsidies to the poor area, it seems less taboo since young people have moved downtown.
https://genius.com/2-skinnee-js-718-lyrics
So much of business is based on perception and you don’t want to give clients any reason to doubt you.
I don't care about ideals. I care about reality.
This is %100 a North American problem.
In the US, the person receiving the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. So sending out a million text messages costs almost nothing, because the expensive part is borne by the receivers.
In the UK and EU, the person sending the call / text pays for the airtime to the cell phone. This price is defined by a government regulator is owed by the sender's network to the owner of the cell tower.
So if some random person sends a text to me, and I'm using an O2 tower, that person has to pay O2 something like £0.20; meaning to send a million text messages would cost you £200k.
The result is that I do get spam messages, but they're always far more directed: normally organizations that I've actually interacted with in the past. Sending a message to a thousand previous customers is a lot more cost-effective (I presume) than sending a message to tens of millions of random phone numbers.
Ironically, the absolute easiest way to solve the US's spam call/text problem is actually market-based: make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver.
Except few of us actually do. Most plans are unlimited for calls and texts at least. If there's a limit, it's on data.
> The result is that I do get spam messages
Ah, but I'm in the US and I don't get any spam texts :). I do get some robocalls though. It's not an easy to solve problem.
> make the caller pay for the entire path of the call, all the way to the receiver
I think the complication here is that the source of the calls and texts are not other mobile phones. They're coming onto the network via SIP. The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used. I can send an email to make a text appear on my phone, and this is a feature I have used occasionally -- how do I bill for that?
Whether you pay per-SMS or whether you pay bulk for "unlimited" calls and texts, you're still paying for the path from the tower to your phone. Calling a cell phone in the US is the same price as calling a landline.
In the UK, it's possible to buy a phone that has no outgoing minutes or texts. This is useful because people can still call you. In fact, at some point there was a provider that would pay you a "cut" on every SMS or phone call you received. And calling a mobile phone -- whether you're calling from a landline or another mobile phone -- is more expensive than calling a landline.
Which is almost certainly one of the key problems with implementing such a system in the US: in the UK and Europe, mobile phone numbers look obviously different than landline numbers, so you know ahead of time that the call is going to cost you more. In the US, they look the same, so you'd never know how much you would get charged.
> The billing mechanism to bill all the way back to the sender might be impossible with the current technologies being used
If you call my mobile phone, my mobile operator will be paid for that call one way or another; I'm pretty sure neither they nor any of the companies in between your phone provider and mine are going to give it away for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Which means the charge-back mechanism is already in place; it's just not used in the US.
Do you really see that happening? "America Bad" is the dominant theme online, including on HN. I see -way- more "gosh I don't understand why America sucks so bad, it's totally perfect over here in Europe" than I see Americans claiming that the US is automatically superior. I feel like in the US we're playing defense way more often, trying to explain misunderstandings and ignorance about how things work here.
To be clear, there are definitely things that work better in Europe. But there are things that the US does pretty well too. Nobody likes to hear that.
That's how weird this phenomenon is to a european. To me it was a solid "WTF?" moment. Since then I've wondered why I've never heard about US:ians tracking down these operations and destroying them.
Similarly, I understand it is free to send SMS in the states, you pay to receive them. Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
Robo calls make sense in the US in part because we used the phone more (remember historic), and in part because "everyone" spoke English and so you could ignore language and reach a lot more people.
That has not been true in many years. Most people have unlimited everything. Cost conscious consumers do opt for plans with limits, but that's on data, not calls and/or SMS.
> Again this is a cost in the UK - though with a headless mobile phone and a SIM with 'unlimited sms' this can be worked around, though the SIM need to be rotated.
The 2 scenarios seem to be:
1) SMS is included in the service. This makes sense. Original SMS were 0-cost to provide; they rode on existing control traffic.
2) Honest people pay per SMS. Spammers don't. As ever, this disproportionately effects honest poor people.
Anyway, Britain and (as far as I know) Ireland also don't suffer from these robocalls.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
I don't have data to compare between the many countries, but anecdotally, Canadians suffer robocalls at a similar rate to US-ians.
Unless this gets regulated Telcos will continue to enjoy their profits.
"At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests."
Devices support attestation level A display (green or grey check marks in your call logs designate this). If you haven't seen that check mark, then you probably haven't seen many A-level attested calls to your device. As far as device manufacturers go, they only care about A-level attestation, which makes sense as it has full traceback capability.
These days, it's just local shady companies. Think: "Expired Vacation" package timeshare pitches and lately callers asking if I have Medicare A and B.
The Medicare stuff, I assume is some kind of fraud, but the kind where they talk you into being a customer for some service so they can bilk the government for that service (which they may or may not deliver). Fraud, but a more insidious kind - not unlike the auto warranty sales calls (which I seem to no longer get either).
So mostly lead generation for shady domestic companies is what I seem to get. You can always tell, because when you ask the name of the company they hang up on you.
I was led to believe that this is technically allowed so I've been using an app (buzzkill) to junk any text containing the name of a politician.
It's funny though - I live in IL as well, and don't get many political texts.
What I do get matches the ratio of political spam I get across all of my various email accounts: It's 90% one party, and 10% or less the other. A fair amount of it doesn't mention party affiliation, and tries to copy the color scheme and design of the other state party even on their websites (which is pretty brazen). FWIW: I'm not registered with any party at any level and have never signed up for any political newsletter AFAIK.
Same, close to zero if not zero (I might have received one late last year or early this year). I do also try to make a bloody nuisance of myself; I'm snoot sure if they have some internal denylist, but I try my hardest to get onto it.
Decades ago we had dialup internet - a service entirely unrelated to the telephone system, built atop the existing telephone infrastructure. The US or EU or whoever could simply design a new service built atop that existing infrastructure.
Telecom companies could double as Certificate Authorities for the new system, providing and signing certificates used to authenticate both sides of a call and encrypt traffic between them. It doesn't even have to be limited to calls. They could also support text or even arbitrary data. It could be a revolutionary new platform for instant communication, separate from the internet and backed by major nations across the world. And the best part is the infrastructure is already built!
Or they could keep playing cat-and-mouse games with spammers for all of eternity.
WhatsApp is a private service facilitated over the internet. No government would (or should) trust Facebook with their communication infrastructure.
Simple solution, and I am surprised at how well it works.
Well, regulations are really, really tough for a couple of reasons. One is, it’s a bureaucratic, slow-moving process.
There's also this notion of regulatory capture. At the FCC, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.
The regulatory capture of the FCC has been discussed for 20 years - just not by major news orgs (or telco industry press, or most tech press).
ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Atechdirt.com+robocalls+fcc+...
earlier ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Adslreports.com+%22karl%22+%...
What I think would be useful is to be able to block based on incoming carrier. During the last election season, most calls were coming from various VoIP services (Twilio, etc), none from normal retail cell carriers. If I could block an entire carrier who specializes in providing text/voice marketing services, problem solved? Legit business users of those services would hopefully migrate away to more ethical providers when their calls start failing to connect.
now I get almost zero spam calls and virtually every call which comes through is legitimate
The phone system is entirely broken. It comes down to economics- there's zero cost to make millions of calls, so your economic benefit formula is obvious- you can make millions of calls because one of them will pay you back mega-$$$. There is no accountability and no way to automatically filter out spam (as we do with email, although to be honest, spam filtering isn't great either). I don't know what to do other than to increase the cost to make phone calls in order to address the perverse incentives at work.
Edit: I’m curious about the downvotes. If you follow the links to the automated system that David built (a honeypot for robocallers) you see the top offenders are Medicare and end of life services. That jives with my own experience. So clearly they’re targeting the elderly and therefore the solution is - ask them to look for a little stir/shaken attestation checkmark before answering their phone?
I don't advertise my phone number, tho I'm sure you could find it if you really want to. If you've really only gotten 10 spams in the last decade, I question whether we are living on the same planet.
I feel the same way when I see a friend ignore a call. I am curious what the difference is. What filters do you have in place? As far as I know, here's what I have:
My number that I've been giving out freely for a decade > Law-abiding spammers check donotcall.gov > Google Voice checks it's known spammers list and forwards legit calls to my Verizon number (whatever that is, I never wrote it down) https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115089 > Verizon checks its known spammers list (free, I think default?) https://www.verizon.com/solutions-and-services/call-filter/ > My Samsung phones have always come stock with a spam filter baked into their Android image https://www.hiya.com/products-smart-call > I get the call
Someone in that pipeline is doing a fantastic job I guess.
I agree that lead-gen is also part of the problem, but fraud seems especially dire. The new fraud vector seems to be SMS initiated.
Robocalls aren't what makes people actually scared to answer their phone.
Depending on their specific situation, it's rather people like, oh, crazy exes, tax/bill collectors, police investigators ...
Also, in general, any time people are in a situation in which bad news might arrive at any moment.
Robocalls are nothing.
Mine don't, it's either from Pakistan or from 2 towns in my country which presumably are the places that provide a forwarding service to them. If I could block +92 and those two towns i currently would get no spam calls.
Also why shouldn't I just be able to block things with a wildcard rather than every individual number.