> 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.
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?"