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The Alexa documentation says > Alexa will let you know when someone is calling, and a green light ring will appear on your supported Echo device. You can ask A
by arjie 9y ago
The Alexa documentation says
> Alexa will let you know when someone is calling, and a green light ring will appear on your supported Echo device. You can ask Alexa to answer or ignore the call.
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16713667011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16713667011
That's similar to a phone, isn't it? This blogpost doesn't seem to have articulated the problem very well.
Is it contacting each of the contacts in some way or adding it to a directory?
- brudgers 9y agoMy experience with imported address books is that the service importing them will often add or update contact channels. For example, if someone has changed their phone number and the service has that person's new phone number in its database, the new number is available for contacting that person. Email can be similar. And of course new channels are added.
- netsharc 9y agoWhatsApp doesn't do this, which I found out when I changed my number. At first I thought it's dumb, but later I realized, it's actually good, because what if I'm running away from an abusive partner. I get a new number, change my WA number, an boom, that partner gets notified that I changed my number. I wish there's an option WhatsApp can send "netsharc has a new number" notification to people I can select out of my address book.
- IanCal 9y agoHaving a publicly known thing that also has to be kept private from some people seems like it's the root cause of the problems. It's like having a single shared password to keep an important resource safe.
- azernik 9y agoNo, it's like having an important resource, period. You have a piece of information that you want some people to have but not others. This is a simple (though not necessarily easy) problem, which happens to get harder as the set of people who you do want to have the information gets larger. Note that you also don't want this to be publicly known - letting random people find your phone number is also considered a Bad Thing.
- dismantlethesun 9y agoIt's a default thing though. Home landlines are publicly listed unless you pay monthly to unlist.
- netsharc 9y agoBut there doesn't seem to be a way to silently block calls. I'm pretty sure on Android or iPhone I can blacklist numbers, so I would not even get a notification that the number tried to call me. If the device says "Call from $CRAZY_EX, do you want to answer?", you'd feel terrorized. Of course the solution would be to unplug the device. It's pathetic that "We will take your whole address book, and tell everyone on it, that you're contactable here." is the default nowadays, that even "secure" alternatives are doing it, e.g. www.jwz.org/blog/2017/03/signal-leaks-your-phone-number-to-everyone-in-your-contacts/ (jwz hates HN so copy-paste this link...).
- MrQuincle 9y agoThat blog post seems unjustified. Quote from one of the comments: "If I understand what Moxie said earlier, the way this actually works is: every single Signal user periodically says to the Signal server, "here are (hashes of) all of the phone numbers in my contacts, which of these are registered with Signal?" Same effect, different mechanism." It's not the case that everyone is told.
- asadlionpk 9y agoI recently had to read that post by moxie to try and implement secure contact discovery in my app. Here it is: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
- MrQuincle 9y agoReally interesting read, thanks! What did you use in the end?
- asadlionpk 9y agoIt's for a side-project with few users and I still have to take that decision. I am too scared to just upload (and store) user contacts on my end. That's a huge responsibility IMO.
- leggomylibro 9y agoMost if not all phone providers give you a way to block specific numbers from even reaching your device. They're usually buried in horrendous web interfaces, but they're there. Seems like something that was probably just overlooked, or pushed out to post-launch because deadlines.
- kwhitefoot 9y agoI just add the number to the contacts list and set the ring tone to silent and no vibration. Eventually I'll notice a missed call but the name I gave the contact will tell me straight away that I don't need to look further.
- raverbashing 9y agoNo because some calls you want to route to /dev/null and there doesn't seem to be any caller ID in Alexa