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How about we just make robocalls illegal. If you can’t pay a person to do it, it must not be important enough.
by MBCook 3y ago
How about we just make robocalls illegal.
If you can’t pay a person to do it, it must not be important enough.
- strangattractor 3y agoI second that proposal. Or at least make all the FCC decider phone numbers public so I can robocall them until they make it illegal. And WTF does AI have to do with it. A non-AI generated but human or digitally created voice is somehow acceptable? There are plenty of voice actors that sound like Taylor Swift or Joe Biden.
- stonogo 3y agoHow many of them are willing to commit wire fraud?
- thfuran 3y agoIf it's wire fraud, then we don't need a new AI-specific law to make it illegal.
- stonogo 3y agoIt's the difference between charging one fraudster vs charging one fraudster plus one voice impersonator. It's also not clear that current laws against impersonation do cover digitally assisted impersonation.
- keenmaster 3y agoThey’re used in political campaigns. Do I need to say more?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- m463 3y agoMaybe unsolicited robocalls.
- thfuran 3y agoToo bad you forgot to uncheck that box that kept rechecking itself at every step of checkout last time you bought a thing online agreeing that the store and all their business and marketing partners could contact you.
- bdcrazy 3y agoA blanket cutoff is ill advised in my opinion. I think it has to depend on the intent behind the phone call. For instance, I got a robocall from the water department monday saying there is a boil advisory in effect due to high water and sediment runoff due to weather. Having enough people for the once in 10 years where ythey needed that many doesn't seem necessary. And once you get into intent sadly, all bets are off.
- JohnFen 3y agoSince I and most everybody I know will never answer a call from a number not in their address book as a direct result of robocalls, I'm not sure that this is a huge issue. If, for instance, my water company called me with such a notice, it's not likely I would actually hear about it that way, because I'd assume it was a robocall. I'd more likely hear about it through other media outlets.
- fragmede 3y agoNo one you know has kids? People with kids have to take calls, in case it's a facility with something to report, so they can't ignore any calls.
- JohnFen 3y agoI know several people with kids, and I have kids of my own. They're no longer young enough for this to matter, but even when they were, I still ignored calls. The main difference was that I actually bothered to listen to any voice mails unknown callers left.
- Buttons840 3y agoThere are people that can only be reached with a phone call. The water company has a responsibility to at least try to reach them.
- atoav 3y agoI have never in my live received a robo call, then again I live in the EU. So yet another one of those unsolvable problems that have been solved elsewhere..
- hooverd 3y agoOr regulate them like SMS campaigns. There is such a thing as transactional robocalls.
- bboygravity 3y agoThis reads a bit like an "only in America and the third world" kind of problem. I never received a robocall in my life (and no spam calls at all after those where made illegal in the EU years ago).
- wilg 3y agoFinally some anti-American sentiment on this website!
- ironmagma 3y agoYes, hardworking Americans are exploited in order to power the rest of the world. There, now I've offended everyone on the planet.
- resolutebat 3y agoI live in a developed country and regularly get robocalls from other countries advising me that I need to urgently contact a bank/the tax department/the Chinese embassy so I don't get thrown in jail. I'm not sure how you can legislate your way out of this, and if you're not getting these in the EU yet, you will soon.
- _v7gu 3y agoI wouldn’t call Canada that. The amount of spam calls I received there made my phone basically unusable for calls. Whereas in a developing country I had like 2-3 ad calls/wk and now I get none in EU.
- supertrope 3y agoThe USA has a huge population of English speakers. This makes robocalls more scalable. It doesn’t cost any more to call cellphones than landlines. Calling some EU country cellphones can cost 0.30 USD/min.
- hakfoo 3y agoI always figured the most marginal of taxes would make it economically unviable. If you charged a nickel to complete a call, the Water and Power Department can at worst, slip a $1 fee into a bill to build up a fund to pay for emergency outage calls. (Hopefully, they don't intend to call each customer more than 20 times per month). But any industry based on spray-and-pray and miniscule take rates will find it too expensive to play.
- IcyWindows 3y agoMy child's school robocalls is it school is canceled for to snow, etc. Paying a bunch of school administrators to call several thousand homes is a waste of money.
- dacryn 3y agowhat's wrong with a text/whatsapp/email/push notification/messenger/...? many systems exist where you have to respond yes to acknowledge receipt. They can manually call the 1% that didn't respond. Robocall technology isn't free either.