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Creating a whitelist service for yourself literally only takes a couple hours studying Twilio docs. Hardly a huge waste of time, and when you get 2 spam calls e

Creating a whitelist service for yourself literally only takes a couple hours studying Twilio docs. Hardly a huge waste of time, and when you get 2 spam calls every morning before 8 am for weeks it's completely worth it.

martin_a 7y ago
Creating change in a society might also only take a couple hours, but serve the people next to you and after you. Just imagine you would be in charge to keep your whole town clean of robocalls. What would you do? Set this up for everybody in town, administer it and take care that it's up 24/7? Helping (anywhere in the line of this process) to pass a law that simply prohibits such calls seems to be more efficient.
- niij 7y ago
  Most robocalls are illegal anyway, unless you've given your explicit consent to a company, like your utility company. Making something illegal doesn't mean it goes away completely (or at all). https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0259-robocalls#legal https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0259-robocalls#legal
  - martin_a 7y ago
    In Germany I can report numbers that are doing spam SMS or calls to a governmental agency and they will be shut down within days. That should be possible for other countries, too.
    - procombo 7y ago
      When you get spam email do you report it to your government? There are plenty of ways to report phone scams, junk calls, auto-dialers. Federal-level, state-level, your own service provider, and the caller's service provider (if you can find them.) You could even also report it to your local police if you feel that concerned about it.... but unless someone is threatening you with violence, they'll just assign you a case number and leave you to it. People who work at all of these agencies also get the same spam and robo calling. There are more important things they are focused on. Secondly, our governments and telcos already have live data of phone call metadata. Reporting by end-users shouldn't even be necessary. All it would take is for third-tier service providers to block outgoing calls for outbounders that have a low ratio of call attempts to calls accepted that last over 10 seconds. Then set a higher threshold for second tier providers. Basically... a simple algorithm could fix this. Just like our email providers "fight" spam. It's a reputation game. The OP you initially berated for simply providing a service is also trying to solve it in the way they best know how. It's industry at work. You may disagree with their methodology, but demotivating small successes is also very unwise. There's an impracticality to the enforcement of something of this scale. Government regulation between telco providers and end-users is obviously needed here. And if you want to get into the thick of it it's not there yet because the same telco providers lobby the same legislation with logic such as "you won't be able to make campaign phone calls with your auto-dialer if this regulation goes through." Until the system at large is re-thought, it's going to continue being a problem. I personally think a new technology is the answer. In the meantime our fed is in the process of shifting the liability of auto-dialers onto the major telcos. I agree with this approach. It's better than making more, stricter laws that (in our case) cannot reasonably be enforced. The answer is obviously not to create government ran call-centers to manually respond to spam complaints.

martin_a 7y ago

Creating change in a society might also only take a couple hours, but serve the people next to you and after you. Just imagine you would be in charge to keep your whole town clean of robocalls. What would you do? Set this up for everybody in town, administer it and take care that it's up 24/7? Helping (anywhere in the line of this process) to pass a law that simply prohibits such calls seems to be more efficient.

niij 7y ago
Most robocalls are illegal anyway, unless you've given your explicit consent to a company, like your utility company. Making something illegal doesn't mean it goes away completely (or at all). https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0259-robocalls#legal https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0259-robocalls#legal
- martin_a 7y ago
  In Germany I can report numbers that are doing spam SMS or calls to a governmental agency and they will be shut down within days. That should be possible for other countries, too.
  - procombo 7y ago
    When you get spam email do you report it to your government? There are plenty of ways to report phone scams, junk calls, auto-dialers. Federal-level, state-level, your own service provider, and the caller's service provider (if you can find them.) You could even also report it to your local police if you feel that concerned about it.... but unless someone is threatening you with violence, they'll just assign you a case number and leave you to it. People who work at all of these agencies also get the same spam and robo calling. There are more important things they are focused on. Secondly, our governments and telcos already have live data of phone call metadata. Reporting by end-users shouldn't even be necessary. All it would take is for third-tier service providers to block outgoing calls for outbounders that have a low ratio of call attempts to calls accepted that last over 10 seconds. Then set a higher threshold for second tier providers. Basically... a simple algorithm could fix this. Just like our email providers "fight" spam. It's a reputation game. The OP you initially berated for simply providing a service is also trying to solve it in the way they best know how. It's industry at work. You may disagree with their methodology, but demotivating small successes is also very unwise. There's an impracticality to the enforcement of something of this scale. Government regulation between telco providers and end-users is obviously needed here. And if you want to get into the thick of it it's not there yet because the same telco providers lobby the same legislation with logic such as "you won't be able to make campaign phone calls with your auto-dialer if this regulation goes through." Until the system at large is re-thought, it's going to continue being a problem. I personally think a new technology is the answer. In the meantime our fed is in the process of shifting the liability of auto-dialers onto the major telcos. I agree with this approach. It's better than making more, stricter laws that (in our case) cannot reasonably be enforced. The answer is obviously not to create government ran call-centers to manually respond to spam complaints.