8 ms·

Thank god, at least some sort of enforcement. At least 90% of phone calls I get are robocalls or spam. But, as the head of a large household, I can't disable u

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• thewebcount 4y ago
  I mean, a legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you. I normally have unknown callers disabled and don't have any problems. I had to turn it off this week because we have a few maintenance things going on and need to answer calls about when people are going to be coming and going for repairs. But otherwise, I turn it off and have never had any issues with not getting critical calls. You can always turn it on if you know you'll be getting an unknown call in the next 24 hours.
  • coryfklein 4y ago
    I have indeed tried this turn it on, turn it off, strategy. Every time it has ended because I forgot to turn it off and I ended up missing a critical phone call; some service person called before coming for a home maintenance appointment to make sure we were present so they could enter the premises, and the call goes to voicemail which I only notice an hour later after they've decided to reschedule fixing my AC to 3 days later and now we have to endure the sweltering 98°F weather for 3 more days all to avoid the nuisance of robocallers.
    • jchw 4y ago
      If you have something that urgent it's better to preemptively turn it off. Yeah yeah, easier said than done, but as a habitual Do Not Disturb user, this has worked well for me.
      • coryfklein 4y ago
        What's the connection to Do Not Disturb? I still haven't explored that functionality fully, and it seems Apple has built it out significantly. I suspect I could benefit by using it better to establish a "at work mode" and a "at home mode", in addition to my current simple usage of "you sure as hell better not wake me up at 3 AM with a notification".
        • aaronbeekay 4y ago
          That’s exactly what they’ve been adding, actually. You can also set a schedule for which mode is active or trigger them with automations.
        • ryandrake 4y ago
          I do "Do Not Disturb" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No calls, no texts, no notifications, no nothing. Yes, Apple has indeed built it out recently. At least on iOS, you can add exceptions if you want, like your favorites, or your contact list, or even specific people. You can also put it on a schedule if you think 24/7 is too extreme. Honestly, I don't worry about the "urgent call from the doctor" scenario, and I have a family. If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail. For 99% of the calls I get, it's not even remotely important. I don't structure my life around outlier scenarios. Not having a phone constantly dinging and buzzing for my attention is worth missing the extremely rare emergency.
          • paul7986 4y ago
            You can also have all numbers (calls) not in your contacts just go straight to voicemail via the "Silence Unknown Number," feature within the phone settings.
  • erickhill 4y ago
    "A legitimate business will leave a voicemail, especially if they want money from you." Unfortunately so do the scammers - both bots and actual people. At least my phone will sometimes text-transcribe the VM so I can quickly scan it and delete it w/o being forced to listen to it.
  • yourapostasy 4y ago
    I’d like a calendar appointment feature where I specify when to disable/enable allowing unknown numbers to ring.
  • oefrha 4y ago
    Approximately 100% of my voicemails are from spammers or scammers.
  • paul7986 4y ago
    Not sure if your an iOS user but i'd love to be able to quickly toggle "Silence Unknown Callers," like i can with wifi, bluetooth, airplane mode, the flashlight and etc (swipe up from the bottom menu). Right now I have to drill down three to four steps (menus) to turn it on and off.
    • orev 4y ago
      You can make a shortcut that takes you right to the screen, but you still have to toggle the setting. It’s a half measure but reduces the frustration a little.
  • orev 4y ago
    This approach just doesn’t work when you have a significant number of outside parties and things to deal with. Doctors’ offices in particular often have calls coming from many different phone numbers and you just can’t rely on white listing them all. Once you get to an age where health issues happen more frequently than an annual checkup, it just doesn’t work.
    • thewebcount 4y ago
      I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. My spouse has a very severe and very expensive chronic illness, and has several doctors visits a month with different doctors. We have had no problem with our doctors reaching us via phone. (And it works way better than any of their "healthcare portals" where nurses actually read your messages and deem all of them non-urgent and don't respond.) We absolutely do have their numbers in our contacts so their calls come through. On those rare occasions when they call from some general number behind a call switch, they leave an appropriate voicemail and we call back. They are sometimes vague with the details on voicemail because they can't be sure who will listen to it, but we are always able to get back to them. FWIW, we're in our 50s and have very frequent health issues, so this is not unknown to me by any means.
      • jnovek 4y ago
        I’m glad this works out for you, but your experience is not universal. I have a chronic condition I am stuck with a hospital system that seems to play PBX roulette. I have a dozen of their phone numbers white listed and still miss an important call coming from a new number from time to time. I hate it, it’s completely out of touch, but it’s not something I have any control over.
        • brewdad 4y ago
          If you are dealing with a doctor who won't leave a "This is Dr. So-and-so. Please call our office." voicemail, find a new doctor. Seriously.
          • 4y ago
  • subsubzero 4y ago
    Thats what I do, if I don't know the number I have voicemail and if they don't leave a message I just block the number. I have thousands of blocked numbers, to be fair the phone experience in 2022 is just horrible due to the FCC and telcos not doing their job in regulating these criminals.
  • dreamcompiler 4y ago
    I try to use voicemail. The reason it doesn't work is that although my phone has 128Gb of storage, for some reason my provider's voicemail system can only store like 10 seconds of audio before it runs out of space and asks me to delete messages. My landline's answering machine is like this too. Apparently there's a special kind of memory just for recording telephone messages and it's as precious as a diamond.
    • MikePlacid 4y ago
      The calls that I did not answer all go to https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ They’ll send email notification immediately after recording a voice message. (The main reason I’ve subscribed to Jolly Roger was to torture robocallers with roboanswers. They had a collection of rather hilarious conversations on their web page. In real life robocallers seem smarter now and drop much sooner, but voicemail feature works ok and I have not noticed any limits - messages are attached to emails and my gmail account is still at 5% or so. I was thinking of implementing the same idea with better technology, like on the fly voice recognition, which seems possible and should lead to tons of funny results, but I’m too lazy now).
  • atkailash 4y ago
  • SomeCallMeTim 4y ago
    Callers with blocked caller ID get screened by Google for me, and I rarely ever hear from them -- but I get a ton of calls from people who either have spoofed numbers or who have temporarily picked up a "source" number based in my area code. It's gotten to the point where if it's a local call I almost always assume it's spam, but I still need to answer. If it's a doctor's office trying to make an appointment, for instance, then getting through to the same person who knows why you're trying to make the appointment so you don't need to give them 100x as much information yet again? Yeah, at that point it's much better to just answer a few spam calls instead of ignoring all of the unfamiliar numbers. I have a kid in college and another in high school. A dead phone could mean I could be getting a call from one of them from any number. I just can't ignore them all. I'm happy for you that your life is simple enough that you can just ignore anything you don't recognize, but try not to act as if the rest of us are doing something wrong because we're happy that the FCC is attacking the underlying problem and ignoring the pain we need to deal with.
  • hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    You can disable unknown callers? Which countries support this? I’m Australia, some government agencies hide caller ID, it’s incredibly frustrating.
• standardUser 4y ago
  We'd be better off with only text communication allowed between unknown parties. It's much easier for us, as humans, to quickly parse text and it's far less disruptive to our lives. I'd like it if calls only occurred between parties who already agreed to that form of communication. Everyone else, leave a fucking note.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    In my family, text communication is difficult for the elderly and/or English as a second language people.
    • lmm 4y ago
      As someone living in a country that uses my third language, texts - where I can use translation tools, or just take my time to read something slowly - are a million times easier than spoken conversation.
• teeray 4y ago
  I feel like the doctors office scenario should be handled like we do with TLS. They apply for a certificate, and that’s signed and offered in their outgoing calls. Their verified name shows up in Caller ID, and the nature of their business is burned into the certificate (medical, government, auto repair, etc.).
  • bombcar 4y ago
    "secure" phone could be done relatively easily, the phone companies don't want to because it would cost them money and reduce revenue.
    • jamiek88 4y ago
      Would it cost them though? hardly any bill per call anymore. Lump sum billing would mean they have to support less volume for the same money.
  • gwright 4y ago
    There is a lot of effort going into this sort of thing: https://www.bandwidth.com/regulations/stir-shaken/ https://www.bandwidth.com/regulations/stir-shaken/
    • teeray 4y ago
      I’m aware, but I don’t think it quite goes far enough. It’s not enough to merely know it’s not a spoofed number. I’d like classification, so I can let any medical practice punch through do not disturb overnight (emergencies involving loved ones), allow others to call during normal business hours (voicemail otherwise), etc., etc.
  • lazide 4y ago
    A great many Dr’s offices can’t even provide a billing estimate or handle the mess of insurance. Do you think they’ll handle something like that on top of it?
    • 4y ago
• akira2501 4y ago
  I ignore all calls I don't know. I've never had a billing issue that didn't go into physical mail first. I don't have any plans to take time to receive calls from the government, they will absolutely mail you. They want 100% of the money if they can get it, they don't want to send you to collections; where they're only going to get a cut of the original sum. It might just be me.. but phones are the ultimate in "false urgency" that our society foists on people. Meanwhile.. it's 2022 and there's no way for me to give an "emergency code" or authorization to people I know which gives them the ability to ring me directly with some kind of emergency flag or icon showing on the call screen itself. That's baffling.
  • LanceH 4y ago
    My physical mail situation is far worse than my phone situation. I missed one bill apparently and got sent to collections. It was from some place that demands that payment be made in full during the visit, so I probably thought it was just junk at the time.
  • supertrope 4y ago
    My desk phone is logged into a SIP VoIP provider that does allow very powerful rules. I can create a phone menu and provide each contact with an extension that must be dialed to ring through. But nothing like that is available for my cellphone. So I ignore all unknown callers.
• googlryas 4y ago
  The trick, which I only implemented by mistake, is to have a phone number from an area where you have no business. I live in Boulder but have a number from North Dakota because I got to pick my phone number and liked the look of one. Now, if I get a call from a 303(Denver/Boulder), I'm almost sure it is real. If I get a call from 701, it is almost certainly a fake.
• r00fus 4y ago
  I gave up - family of 5, but I do the following: my iPhone auto-silences unknown callers (system setting) and I only share my Google Voice account publicly (ie, only friends/family have my direct line). I also have scam-block from my carrier. It seems to work quite well. I miss an occasional call but have progressively whitelisted (add as contacts) all numbers from school/doc/programs as well. It does take some diligence but it feels better than getting sideswiped by some rando.
• londons_explore 4y ago
  For home users, there is a simple solution to spam... Anyone not in your contacts gets sent to voicemail. The voicemail 'greeting' message says "Hi, if you need to contact me, send me an email to [your email address] and I'll call back. If it's urgent, put 'urgent' in the subject and I'll call back immediately.". Set a rule so that urgent emails make your phone vibrate/make noise. Robocallers won't do that. Most real humans will. Marketers usually won't. Collections agencies usually will. It's the perfect filter.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  Perhaps there are some fundamental problems here if it's legal for you to be extorted by debt collectors because some office worker decided to not leave a voicemail. And O The Irony! that one reason you're forced to make yourself available at a publicly known phone because of the threat of someone extorting you who is themselves not available at a publicly known phone number.
• buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I have this same problem and concern, and it doesn't work to use voicemail because the robocallers end up filling my voicemail within hours of clearing it out. The most effective way I have found for dealing with it is horrible but it seems to work. A lot of the robocaller people that I actually end up talking to often sound like they are from a particular nation, not naming any names here. I also happen to know many people from the aforementioned country are quite prejudiced against those of another country that shares a border with them, so when I get a call I do my best accent of a person belonging to the other country and start rambling nonsense about how I just immigrated to America, and I own a shop that sales a particular ethnic food and start offering it to them. Usually I get about 3 minutes in and they hang up. So far of everything I've tried, including using the "Remove me from the list" button this has been the most effective way I've experienced of reducing calls. It may be terrible but it works, and here's the thing every minute they are spending speaking to an irate man of a particular ethnicity is a minute of their time wasted not speaking to someone who is going to talk to them. P.S For those who are really curious the countries anonymized about are Scotland and England. ;)
  • jader201 4y ago
    > robocallers end up filling my voicemail within hours of clearing it out. This does not match my experience at all. For me, I get a robo call to voicemail maybe once every 2-3 weeks. This is compared to the maybe 3-5 per day I receive (but don’t make it to me, since I have non-contacts silenced).
• throwaway2037 4y ago
  This sounds like a good opportunity for a start-up that uses AI/ML to answer your calls and screen them using a human-sounding voice. What the US really needs is enormous fines and strict enforcement, similar to Germany. I have read so many posts on HN by people who live in Germany that say their robo-calls are almost zero. And plenty of stories about enormous fines to companies for robo-calls.
  • pavel_lishin 4y ago
    > This sounds like a good opportunity for a start-up that uses AI/ML to answer your calls and screen them using a human-sounding voice. I think for 95% of incoming callers, this is functionally equivalent to just not picking up. If I call someone and suspect I'm talking to a robot, I'll just hang up.
• stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Any legit person or company will leave a voice mail. I only allow my contacts list through. Anything else goes straight to email.
• jader201 4y ago
  > I'm not confident they would leave a voicemail > the caller is originating from some complex web of VOIP systems > when I call back I get a machine asking for an extension, which the caller forgot to leave in the voicemail! Is this really a risk? If it’s that important, they’ll leave a proper VM. I’ve had my phone set to silence non-contacts, and aside from the occasional call where I prefer they didn’t have to leave a VM, I almost never have problems. The few times it’s caused me problems, it’s been just an inconvenience. But about 0.1% the inconvenience of dealing with all the robo calls making it through.