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It's not the first time Google sides with scammers. What comes to mind is blocking of the phone call recording API in Android. I can imagine insurance companies

It's not the first time Google sides with scammers. What comes to mind is blocking of the phone call recording API in Android. I can imagine insurance companies and various other organisations involved in from phone sales to outright scams had a "talk" with Google to have this removed from the phones as consumers had too much power. I myself got scammed by insurance company - they claimed I will get a certain option, but after I paid and got all the paperwork, there was no mention of the option I was supposed to get. Thankfully I recorded all calls with that company and only when I said I had them lying on record they changed their tune and refunded me. I am now struggling to find a new phone that can record calls as if there was a conspiracy to never talk about this feature as well. I couldn't find any review that would test if call recording is possible.

gruez 6y ago
Can't you just put your phone on speaker and use a second device to record? > can imagine insurance companies and various other organisations involved in from phone sales to outright scams had a "talk" with Google to have this removed from the phones as consumers had too much power. Seems like a conspiracy theory to me. The call recording functionality isn't exactly known by most people, not to mention it's trivially bypassed (see above).
- rjmunro 6y ago
  > Can't you just put your phone on speaker and use a second device to record? Only if: 1. You are somewhere where using a speaker phone won't annoy other people (or leak secrets to them) 2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device 3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Only if: 1. You are somewhere where using a speaker phone won't annoy other people (or leak secrets to them) Isn't that an issue even if you're not using speakerphone? Companies regularly ask you for your name/address/birthday/secret question/credit card number, so you'll be leaking that info regardless of whether you're using speakerphone or not. >2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device that doesn't seem too hard. most people have a old phone or a laptop/tablet, failing that they can borrow one from their SO. >3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible. I'm struggling to think of situations where this would be an issue, that isn't already covered by the first point. Are you canceling services on the side of a road or something?
    - DonHopkins 6y ago
      He has valid points, and you're really bending over backwards and lacking imagination in trying to dismiss them. Most people can speak into a phone more quietly than they'd have to turn the speaker up enough to record it with another device. Not everyone has an SO, not everyone with an SO is with them 24/7, and not everyone's SO has a spare phone/laptop/tablet immediately available for them to use. And not everyone wants to ask the caller to wait while they ask their SO to borrow their extra device, and set it up to record. And not everyone wants to go through the process of transferring audio recordings from one device and account to another every time they record a conversation. And many people do actually find themselves in situations with lots of background noise, or enough free hands or convenient surfaces to keep all the devices together, even if you can't imagine yourself ever being in such a situation. And not everyone wants shitty noisy low quality analog recordings of their conversations played on a speaker phone, instead of high fidelity digital recordings of the original audio.
      - varispeed 6y ago
        That's why I keep my old Android phone and I kept postponing system update for two years now (you cannot disable update notification so this is quite annoying), as I know that update disables call recording API. I would love to upgrade, but I have no idea what's the best way to figure out if call recording works on a particular phone without having to buy it. My plan B is to replace the battery and the screen in my current phone and maybe squeeze another year or two out of it and it will be fun to learn how to do it. It's old, but is still better than e.g. Librem 5.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
Samsung phones now have a "Screen Recorder" option built-in, and I see that "Media sounds and mic" are included, so I'm assuming if you turned that on, it would capture both your end and the other end. I haven't tried it, though: https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00084187/ https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00084187/ You'd also presumably be getting a video dump, but you could always just extract the audio layer from it.
- varispeed 6y ago
  These recorders usually will only capture your microphone and will not record the sound on the other side. People used to put their phone on a loudspeaker so that internal microphone would catch some audio, but that's far from ideal.
jcrawfordor 6y ago
This issue is absolutely infuriating. I have to run certain calls through an external VoIP system in order to record them, because intentionally or not Google has gotten call recording in Android into an utterly broken state. Most of the time proper call recording is not possible. Some of the time it might be, if you have rooted the device, for some devices. It is next to impossible to figure out what the case is for a given device unless you buy one, root it, and try. I have resorted to using an old-fashioned stick-on microphone made for a desk phone and an external voice recorder in some cases, but this obviously isn't a very portable solution and given the obvious potential of smartphones it's ridiculous that external hardware is required for such a basic feature. A feature that Google themselves once made a big point of offering with Google Voice, but one wonders if that's just because it was a feature of Grand Central they didn't feel they could cut without losing too many users---not that Google Voice has ever felt like a very active product on Google's end, with the decade plus UI stagnation and Google Hangouts integration. There is some technical complexity involved here because, at least on older phones, during phone calls the baseband seizes direct control of some audio hardware, so the speaker audio may not "pass through" the operating system at all. But it used to be that call-recording was straightforwardly possible on older devices as a baseband feature and for the large part it seems to have been intentionally removed after the first generation or two of Android devices.

gruez 6y ago

Can't you just put your phone on speaker and use a second device to record? > can imagine insurance companies and various other organisations involved in from phone sales to outright scams had a "talk" with Google to have this removed from the phones as consumers had too much power. Seems like a conspiracy theory to me. The call recording functionality isn't exactly known by most people, not to mention it's trivially bypassed (see above).

rjmunro 6y ago
> Can't you just put your phone on speaker and use a second device to record? Only if: 1. You are somewhere where using a speaker phone won't annoy other people (or leak secrets to them) 2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device 3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Only if: 1. You are somewhere where using a speaker phone won't annoy other people (or leak secrets to them) Isn't that an issue even if you're not using speakerphone? Companies regularly ask you for your name/address/birthday/secret question/credit card number, so you'll be leaking that info regardless of whether you're using speakerphone or not. >2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device that doesn't seem too hard. most people have a old phone or a laptop/tablet, failing that they can borrow one from their SO. >3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible. I'm struggling to think of situations where this would be an issue, that isn't already covered by the first point. Are you canceling services on the side of a road or something?
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    He has valid points, and you're really bending over backwards and lacking imagination in trying to dismiss them. Most people can speak into a phone more quietly than they'd have to turn the speaker up enough to record it with another device. Not everyone has an SO, not everyone with an SO is with them 24/7, and not everyone's SO has a spare phone/laptop/tablet immediately available for them to use. And not everyone wants to ask the caller to wait while they ask their SO to borrow their extra device, and set it up to record. And not everyone wants to go through the process of transferring audio recordings from one device and account to another every time they record a conversation. And many people do actually find themselves in situations with lots of background noise, or enough free hands or convenient surfaces to keep all the devices together, even if you can't imagine yourself ever being in such a situation. And not everyone wants shitty noisy low quality analog recordings of their conversations played on a speaker phone, instead of high fidelity digital recordings of the original audio.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      That's why I keep my old Android phone and I kept postponing system update for two years now (you cannot disable update notification so this is quite annoying), as I know that update disables call recording API. I would love to upgrade, but I have no idea what's the best way to figure out if call recording works on a particular phone without having to buy it. My plan B is to replace the battery and the screen in my current phone and maybe squeeze another year or two out of it and it will be fun to learn how to do it. It's old, but is still better than e.g. Librem 5.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

Samsung phones now have a "Screen Recorder" option built-in, and I see that "Media sounds and mic" are included, so I'm assuming if you turned that on, it would capture both your end and the other end. I haven't tried it, though: https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00084187/ https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00084187/ You'd also presumably be getting a video dump, but you could always just extract the audio layer from it.

varispeed 6y ago
These recorders usually will only capture your microphone and will not record the sound on the other side. People used to put their phone on a loudspeaker so that internal microphone would catch some audio, but that's far from ideal.

jcrawfordor 6y ago

This issue is absolutely infuriating. I have to run certain calls through an external VoIP system in order to record them, because intentionally or not Google has gotten call recording in Android into an utterly broken state. Most of the time proper call recording is not possible. Some of the time it might be, if you have rooted the device, for some devices. It is next to impossible to figure out what the case is for a given device unless you buy one, root it, and try. I have resorted to using an old-fashioned stick-on microphone made for a desk phone and an external voice recorder in some cases, but this obviously isn't a very portable solution and given the obvious potential of smartphones it's ridiculous that external hardware is required for such a basic feature. A feature that Google themselves once made a big point of offering with Google Voice, but one wonders if that's just because it was a feature of Grand Central they didn't feel they could cut without losing too many users---not that Google Voice has ever felt like a very active product on Google's end, with the decade plus UI stagnation and Google Hangouts integration. There is some technical complexity involved here because, at least on older phones, during phone calls the baseband seizes direct control of some audio hardware, so the speaker audio may not "pass through" the operating system at all. But it used to be that call-recording was straightforwardly possible on older devices as a baseband feature and for the large part it seems to have been intentionally removed after the first generation or two of Android devices.