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While this sucks, my phone is in so many data breaches at this point it doesn’t matter. The spam-to-ham ratio on my phone number is now far worse than any othe

While this sucks, my phone is in so many data breaches at this point it doesn’t matter. The spam-to-ham ratio on my phone number is now far worse than any other channel for me. The traditional phone network is at risk of going the way of the fax machine if we don’t do something about the spam problem like we did with email. If I’m on a call, even with family, it’s now almost exclusively on FaceTime/zoom/meet/etc. I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call. Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives — once they capture the market fully they will eventually dump ads all over your calls. Don’t believe me? Just look at what Gmail did to monetize the lock-in on your inbox.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
I think that is intentional, AFAIK phone communication is more protected than other types so allowing spam to continue unabated is in the governments interest. Outsourcing the harassment to 3rd parties, similar to how prison torture is outsourced to the inmates. The government could fix these things but would rather not.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  I think we just don't have very much competition in telecommunications so things never get fixed. Why bother? It's easier to extract rent off largely the same offerings as the rest of your market (difficult to understand pricing tiers that function as a congestion tax more than a transaction, often region-specific monopolies or duopolies, indistinguishable quality of service) and bring home large profits, market efficiency damned. Yes, I'm exaggerating. No, it's not by much.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    Almost no-one is pro-spam, it’s pretty much universally hated, and in many cases it’s already illegal so it’s more of a matter of enforcement. It is also trivial to detect. Sure there probably is some regulatory capture but if anything at all can be regulated it’s spam calls / messages. If the government can’t regulate spam then what could it be expected to regulate. The general population is increasing worried about scam calls for their elderly relatives, it’s already a big deal.
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      > Almost no-one is pro-spam In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam: spammers, obviously, and the entities that provide them services from which they may spam. Oh sure basically any provider of any service be it phone, web hosting, email, etc. will say they don't want spammers, and the email providers may actually mean it what with them not wanting their server's scores trashed and be unable to get email to anyone (though plenty others don't give a shit), but website hosts, telephone companies, and SMS providers? They utterly do not care and in fact go out of their way to not know when spammers are (mis)using their services. Meanwhile like that other commenter said, everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity. I doubt they're conspiring in a dark room somewhere, but neither side is going to upset at the other in that situation.
      - cjbgkagh 2y ago
        Hence my other example of the inability to police prisons enough to prevent abuse, I didn't allege an explicit scheming but a happy little accident. Allowing a problem to fester when it benefits you is totally normal and expected behavior. But if there is a role for government at all it would be regulate such dysfunctions.
      - iudqnolq 2y ago
        Not quite. For example politicians benefit from being able to solicit donations over mass text.
      - darby_nine 2y ago
        > In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam you forgot the entire marketing industry > everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity These walled gardens actively spam you—that's how they make money. They only act against competing advertisers. For there to be an incentive to avoid spam, we would need a social network not funded by it. To my knowledge this is essentially ActivityPub. In order for ActivityPub to be useful, we need an incentive to drag celebrities away from private paychecks that benefit from manipulation of other social networks (twitter, ig, tt). I don't believe there is any such entity or incentivization right now.
  - treflop 2y ago
    Email is easier to mitigate spam with. The whole body of the message is given upfront.
    - varjag 2y ago
      It's easy now. It was an unsolved problem two decades ago. And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. Like in our great Red Tape Europe, even with uptick in recent years we have a tiny fraction of spam calls compared to the United States.
      - darby_nine 2y ago
        > It's easy now. If this were true we wouldn't have spam > And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements. B) "Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam." telecoms don't have any clue who is calling, see above comments about treaties.
        varjag 2y ago
        > if this were true we wouldn't have spam I was replying to the comment asserting that dealing with email spam is easier, which it most resolutely wasn't until the advent of statistical filters. > A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements. Fun thing about treaties and agreements is they are not laws of nature and can be entered, abandoned and amended at will. A lot of regulation is getting constantly updated.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      > Email is easier to mitigate spam with Absolutely disagree, email is the spam king. Just the fact that you can contact someone without consent breaks the entire system.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I make and receive regular phone calls all the time. However I only answer those that are from numbers I have in my address book. I do the same with text messages, I have my default view set to "Known Senders" so I'm not even really aware of others. If I'm expecting an unknown sender message, such as a TFA code, it's easy enough to just look in "Unknown Senders" for it.
Ghexor 2y ago
How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Advertising is a cancer on modern society. It will metastasize to any new communications medium, public or private, and destroy it from within. People will switch to new medium that offer less spam, but advertisers quickly follow to strip-mine the new channel. A cycle of life, so to speak.
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    It’s also so annoying circular. We spend money to get more clients but this stops being effective at a certain point so now you’re just spending money to advertise for the sake of it or the status, and could even be losing money by doing so.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      In my experience, the fear of missing out is a big driver for companies to continue to throw good money after bad in marketing. Maybe Facebook ads aren't driving as much traffic to your company as it used to, but if you give it up and all your competitors still use it it's pretty understandable to worry about falling behind the market.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two separate things in my book. However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc. It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago. Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!
bonestamp2 2y ago
> I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call Doctors and dentists. Most of the calls I get are spam, but then the MOST important calls I get are from doctors, labs, and dentists. I do as much as possible online of course, but not all of these professionals have good online systems and phone calls are often required. Sometimes you know what number they're going to be calling from ahead of time, but often you don't... especially if you're in a large medical network that has different offices for different specialists, etc. It's a really sad situation if you get sick and you're trying not to miss these important calls, especially when it's a long wait for a specialist and then you miss their call when they get to your name on the waiting list. This will literally cost some people their lives and legislators need to act on making spoof calls impossible -- there's no reason why anyone should be allowed to spoof a number that they can't receive calls at.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  > I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call Social services are another example. Many services are county-administered and thus don't have a centralized online platform. As always our most vulnerable populations suffer the most from techno-greed. Not the families of software engineers who built the system.
- thephyber 2y ago
  I recently had to help my father organize his medical visits. Dealing with his healthcare providers was a bit of a pain, but it was way worse because he has stopped answering calls, primarily because of the call spam rate. I think because he owns his own business, he never fails to hand out his contact info when he is shopping, and he owns his own business (so his contact info is published by the city). His phone provider has a feature to opt into spam filtering, his phone has another, and I downloaded a spam list filtering app for him. I disabled the ringer for numbers not in his contact list. I did similar actions to reduce spam in his text messages. This was a good triage, but the damage is already done to his psyche. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
  - 2y ago
DougN7 2y ago
I’ve been impressed with my iPhone and/or carrier (AT&T in the US) for tagging incoming calls as spam or telemarketing. The phone does still ring but I know not to answer it.
joe_the_user 2y ago
My phone number is from a different area code than I currently live in and I know no one from that area anymore. I can filter out 80% of spam just by ignoring calls from that area. I wind-up using the phone because so many organizations malevolently misfeature they websites - doing what you want to (pay basic bill or whatever) is hard but upselling and new features, those you can do instantly.
deleted 2y ago
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yread 2y ago
Is this like an American thing? I'm in the Netherlands and i get like 1 spam call per two months (business internet/electricity salesperson usually)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- xyst 2y ago
  America doesn’t have privacy laws that prevent robot spam. Repercussions for violating the SPAM Act are not prosecuted very often. Personally, the only “spam” I get is flagged by the cellular provider and 99% of the time the calls are silenced. Not really an issue for me. The only people that “call” me are in my contacts list anyways. Everyone else can leave a VM or text message.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    It's also far, far cheaper to make calls to US mobiles than mobiles in any other developed country. Like call termination to an EU mobile is 10x+ than a US mobile.
- grardb 2y ago
  Definitely. I'm American and I've lived in the Netherlands for the past three years. The difference is night and day. Whenever I visit, I switch to my US SIM card and am immediately bombarded with spam texts (mostly from political parties) and scam calls. In my experience, Android is pretty good at marking calls and texts as "potential scams," but they're still there. In the Netherlands, I've gotten a few scam attempts via WhatsApp. Other than that, I think I've received one phone call soliciting donations to the Red Cross, and nothing else.
- cordenr 2y ago
  In Spain I get at least 4 or 5 calls a week from different providers. Luckily at the moment, there's still a delay after you answer the call as (I assume) you're being connected to a human. How long will this last....? Currently, when I don't hear a voice within 1s or so, I hang up. A legitimate caller will (hopefully) call back pretty quick.
xyst 2y ago
> Gmail did to monetize the lock-in on your inbox This is why I have my own mail server and domain. Full control over mail, and access to features that you pay for (ie, unlimited e-mail aliases, control over mailbox size). No more worrying about “google decided to shut your free account down for whatever reason. Bye bye decades of emails and loss to services that use email based OTP or magic link login.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> If I’m on a call, even with family, it’s now almost exclusively on FaceTime/zoom/meet/etc. I really don't get that. I don't get these, on neither of my phones (I've got two numbers). When it rings, it's virtually always friends or family. Sometimes the bank/insurance/doctor. Very exceptionally do I get a commercial or scam call. I think it's not an argument good enough to excuse to excuse Authy here: "my phone already leaked, so what's one more leak!?". > Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives Oh I fully agree. I'm using Telegram for chat but zero FaceTime/meet/WhatsApp here. People want to call me, they usually phone me. Once in a rare while Telegram.
- iamtheworstdev 2y ago
  i'm jealous of you. I recently had a day where I got 25 phone calls. 23 were spam. Turning on iOS "ignore unrecognize phone numbers" has been amazing (i assume android has the same feature)
  - graemep 2y ago
    Wow. I was wondering why people were fussing about the odd spam call! The most I have had is 2 in a day and my number is in websites, social media, whatever. Almost all spam is instantly recognisable. Mostly visa and parcel delivery scams. In do not block unknown numbers because lots of organisations use them here (UK) This includes people I really do want to be able to contact me if they want to such as the police.
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      > here (UK) I think it's mostly just an issue in the US/North America
      - katbyte 2y ago
        I’m in Canada and get maybe a couple scam calls a month
  - 2y ago
Angostura 2y ago
Interesting. Here in the UK I get about 1 spam phone call a year.
kccqzy 2y ago
> I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call Doctors, dentists, moving companies, home improvement contractors, recruiters, etc. These are some of the most important phone calls I've received in recent memory. I don't know what world you live in, but I religiously block phone numbers after just one spam call. And I usually don't give out my phone number. (I'm much happier giving out email addresses since I have an infinite supply of addresses.) I never get enough spam calls that I feel like the phone system is going the way of the fax machine.
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
  Agreed. Phone calls are quite common in my circle. Spam calls have definitely risen in the last 10 years, but the ratio is nothing like the GP.
9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
The solution to phone spam is voicemail transcription. Every call goes to voicemail, I get the transcription in a minute or two, and can call back if I want to.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  With the caveat that this now adds a third-party transcriber that logs the content of every single voicemail you get. Which will definitely end up in some data breach at some point.
- diebeforei485 2y ago
  This is what you get on iPhone with the "Silence Unknown Callers" setting.
K0HAX 2y ago
The telephone companies make money based on minutes of usage. There is a very large financial incentive for the really big telcos to allow spam calls. Spam callers are likely the most lucrative customer of the telephone network for the telephone companies.
- ternaryoperator 2y ago
  > The telephone companies make money based on minutes of usage. I don't see how that could be correct. Once you pay your monthly fee, the fewer minutes you tie up the company's resources the better for them. That's true too for pay-ahead plans.
  - wasmitnetzen 2y ago
    Your provider get paid by the caller's provider for taking the call, and the marginal costs of a phone call are close to zero.
ranger_danger 2y ago
IMO The problem with data breaches is not the phone number being exposed, it's the other data around it that one can combine with other breaches to make full profiles of a person's comings and goings, their location/purchase history, their associations and preferences, etc. This is very valuable data to have, not only for advertisers, but also criminals and other bad actors. Also, the fact that nobody ever questions the authenticity of leaked data should be VERY alarming. Imagine what power someone can hold over someone with manipulated leak data.
- brewdad 2y ago
  Doesn’t even have to be manipulated just incorrect. I share a rather uncommon name with at least two others within five years of my age. I get emails intended for either of them almost daily. One holds political views completely opposite my own. The other is rebuilding his life after a couple years in prison. I would rather not have my own life intertwined with either of them but undoubtedly it already is to some degree.
bottled_poe 2y ago
Yet another reason the digital world is marching towards a closed-by-default model.
paul7986 2y ago
The phone network we once knew is useless in terms of answering or bothering with any calls or text from those not in your contacts. If you do .. you do so at your own risk!
squigz 2y ago
> While this sucks, my phone is in so many data breaches at this point it doesn’t matter. Yes, and this is the slope that we keep sliding down with these data breaches not being taken seriously. First it was your name and email. Now phone numbers. What's the next bit of our private info that we'll normalize leaking?
- hansvm 2y ago
  Currently, any password from more than 6 months ago, names of all my acquaintances, photos of all my paystubs over the last 6yrs (thank you Equifax and dishonest HR platforms), .... Astounding amounts of misconduct are normalized. They're just not widely known yet.
bad_user 2y ago
I'm an European and I get zero spam calls. I used to get a couple of cold calls per year for surveys, but I got unlisted via GDPR requests and now its down to zero. Companies do try collecting your phone number, but then I answer NO to the obligatory "do you want the latest offers" question (in the EU, this is opt-in not opt-out). And it doesn't matter if my phone number leaks. This is similar to my email address use. I used to get emails from recruiters, but after a couple of replies informing them that whatever profile they have is illegal, with my email address not being public, asking them to delete it, the emails stopped. I still get spam, but it's mostly fraud and US companies. Fastmail's spam filters are good enough, BTW. My phone number works just fine, and the phone network is valuable given the better signal 2G can have, or the fact that not everyone is on the app du jour. And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp. I frequently see US folks criticising GDPR, so I'm guessing this is one of those "the US mind can't comprehend" moments.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp. Given that you're European, do you not have any friends/family outside your country, in neighboring EU countries? Wouldn't they have to pay high per-minute rates to call you?
  - arkh 2y ago
    https://mobile.free.fr/fiche-forfait-free https://mobile.free.fr/fiche-forfait-free Example from one provider: nope with 100 countries. Including the US, Canada, China etc.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Looks expensive. What about the regular phone plans? For instance, the plan I use currently in Japan has high per-minute or per-SMS charges for international numbers. The trade-off, of course, is that it's dirt cheap as long as you don't call international numbers, and basically just use it for mobile data. In a place where everyone uses LINE for communication, this works well.
    - 2y ago
dapago 2y ago
I’ve found some success is curbing spam calls with the “Silence Unknown Callers” feature in iPhone. However this presents a few challenges. Mainly missing calls from delivery agents, who's number is obviously not in my iPhone contacts
raxxorraxor 2y ago
I have never shared my phone number with any online service aside from my bank and I don't get any spam on my phone. I still don't recommend to do that and just toss those that demand your phone number away. Get a business phone if your work demands it.
p51-remorse 2y ago
Easy trick: Every time you get a spam call, answer it. Talk to them until _they_ hang up. String them along. Put them on speakerphone and keep working. Feed them fake credit card numbers (there are generators out there that create numbers that checksum correctly, so they type them into whatever they're using to bill numbers. Hopefully this helps flag them as a bad actor to the processors, idk). It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious. My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good. Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.
- jollofricepeas 2y ago
  This works. I started doing this as well. I mimic the Jolly Roger call service and they usually hang up in less than a minute. Ex… - Act like you can’t hear them - Ask them to restart what they were saying - Start a conversation with a fictional person in the background It’s fun and makes getting spam calls enjoyable. https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ https://jollyrogertelephone.com/
  - remram 2y ago
    Reminds me of Lenny: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot) That one was just a recording of an old person saying weird incomprehensible things and asking for clarification at random intervals. No AI.
- grvdrm 2y ago
  Incredible post. Starting this today!
tracker1 2y ago
Very similar here... same for my primary gmail address... the most annoying thing is the "credit monitoring" that comes with a few of my credit cards is all but worthless... I get constant notices that my "email is compromised" but absolutely no detail on how/where/what exactly is compromised, with is like saying, your email is public. While I do get a few regular phone calls a week, they're all in my contacts and I don't answer if the number isn't... at least 2/3 the time if I decide to answer as I'm expecting an out of band call, it's spam. On the flip side, I am wanting to setup for "your code is XXXXXX" as a verification on a personal website I'm working on to allow for public users. I know it doesn't add too much, but it's enough to reduce the noise. I'm not even sure what more hoops I need to jump through with Twilio to get to send said messages. I'm not a company, and not sending any kind of marketing campaign.
knodi 2y ago
Really? I get nearly zero spam text maybe 1-2 per year, even voice calls now. I get maybe 1 per month now. I'm with US carrier TMobile and on iOS.
gregcohn 2y ago
Anyone who has kids has to answer the phone from strangers routinely. School staff and camp counselors are routinely using their own cell phones these days to communicate with parents. Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once. The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam. In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.
EasyMark 2y ago
I feel the same way. I get far too many “hey!” Or “Hello?” “What’s up?” messages on my phone that never say another thing. Any family/friend of mine knows me well enough to try more than once to get my attention via messages, and 99% of them should probably be in my contact list already and I’ll hear the beep.

cjbgkagh 2y ago

I think that is intentional, AFAIK phone communication is more protected than other types so allowing spam to continue unabated is in the governments interest. Outsourcing the harassment to 3rd parties, similar to how prison torture is outsourced to the inmates. The government could fix these things but would rather not.

darby_nine 2y ago
I think we just don't have very much competition in telecommunications so things never get fixed. Why bother? It's easier to extract rent off largely the same offerings as the rest of your market (difficult to understand pricing tiers that function as a congestion tax more than a transaction, often region-specific monopolies or duopolies, indistinguishable quality of service) and bring home large profits, market efficiency damned. Yes, I'm exaggerating. No, it's not by much.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Almost no-one is pro-spam, it’s pretty much universally hated, and in many cases it’s already illegal so it’s more of a matter of enforcement. It is also trivial to detect. Sure there probably is some regulatory capture but if anything at all can be regulated it’s spam calls / messages. If the government can’t regulate spam then what could it be expected to regulate. The general population is increasing worried about scam calls for their elderly relatives, it’s already a big deal.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > Almost no-one is pro-spam In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam: spammers, obviously, and the entities that provide them services from which they may spam. Oh sure basically any provider of any service be it phone, web hosting, email, etc. will say they don't want spammers, and the email providers may actually mean it what with them not wanting their server's scores trashed and be unable to get email to anyone (though plenty others don't give a shit), but website hosts, telephone companies, and SMS providers? They utterly do not care and in fact go out of their way to not know when spammers are (mis)using their services. Meanwhile like that other commenter said, everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity. I doubt they're conspiring in a dark room somewhere, but neither side is going to upset at the other in that situation.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      Hence my other example of the inability to police prisons enough to prevent abuse, I didn't allege an explicit scheming but a happy little accident. Allowing a problem to fester when it benefits you is totally normal and expected behavior. But if there is a role for government at all it would be regulate such dysfunctions.
    - iudqnolq 2y ago
      Not quite. For example politicians benefit from being able to solicit donations over mass text.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      > In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam you forgot the entire marketing industry > everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity These walled gardens actively spam you—that's how they make money. They only act against competing advertisers. For there to be an incentive to avoid spam, we would need a social network not funded by it. To my knowledge this is essentially ActivityPub. In order for ActivityPub to be useful, we need an incentive to drag celebrities away from private paychecks that benefit from manipulation of other social networks (twitter, ig, tt). I don't believe there is any such entity or incentivization right now.
- treflop 2y ago
  Email is easier to mitigate spam with. The whole body of the message is given upfront.
  - varjag 2y ago
    It's easy now. It was an unsolved problem two decades ago. And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. Like in our great Red Tape Europe, even with uptick in recent years we have a tiny fraction of spam calls compared to the United States.
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      > It's easy now. If this were true we wouldn't have spam > And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements. B) "Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam." telecoms don't have any clue who is calling, see above comments about treaties.
      - varjag 2y ago
        > if this were true we wouldn't have spam I was replying to the comment asserting that dealing with email spam is easier, which it most resolutely wasn't until the advent of statistical filters. > A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements. Fun thing about treaties and agreements is they are not laws of nature and can be entered, abandoned and amended at will. A lot of regulation is getting constantly updated.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    > Email is easier to mitigate spam with Absolutely disagree, email is the spam king. Just the fact that you can contact someone without consent breaks the entire system.

SoftTalker 2y ago

I make and receive regular phone calls all the time. However I only answer those that are from numbers I have in my address book. I do the same with text messages, I have my default view set to "Known Senders" so I'm not even really aware of others. If I'm expecting an unknown sender message, such as a TFA code, it's easy enough to just look in "Unknown Senders" for it.

Ghexor 2y ago

How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Advertising is a cancer on modern society. It will metastasize to any new communications medium, public or private, and destroy it from within. People will switch to new medium that offer less spam, but advertisers quickly follow to strip-mine the new channel. A cycle of life, so to speak.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  It’s also so annoying circular. We spend money to get more clients but this stops being effective at a certain point so now you’re just spending money to advertise for the sake of it or the status, and could even be losing money by doing so.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    In my experience, the fear of missing out is a big driver for companies to continue to throw good money after bad in marketing. Maybe Facebook ads aren't driving as much traffic to your company as it used to, but if you give it up and all your competitors still use it it's pretty understandable to worry about falling behind the market.
- pembrook 2y ago
  I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two separate things in my book. However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc. It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago. Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!

bonestamp2 2y ago

> I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call Doctors and dentists. Most of the calls I get are spam, but then the MOST important calls I get are from doctors, labs, and dentists. I do as much as possible online of course, but not all of these professionals have good online systems and phone calls are often required. Sometimes you know what number they're going to be calling from ahead of time, but often you don't... especially if you're in a large medical network that has different offices for different specialists, etc. It's a really sad situation if you get sick and you're trying not to miss these important calls, especially when it's a long wait for a specialist and then you miss their call when they get to your name on the waiting list. This will literally cost some people their lives and legislators need to act on making spoof calls impossible -- there's no reason why anyone should be allowed to spoof a number that they can't receive calls at.

tmpz22 2y ago
> I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call Social services are another example. Many services are county-administered and thus don't have a centralized online platform. As always our most vulnerable populations suffer the most from techno-greed. Not the families of software engineers who built the system.
thephyber 2y ago
I recently had to help my father organize his medical visits. Dealing with his healthcare providers was a bit of a pain, but it was way worse because he has stopped answering calls, primarily because of the call spam rate. I think because he owns his own business, he never fails to hand out his contact info when he is shopping, and he owns his own business (so his contact info is published by the city). His phone provider has a feature to opt into spam filtering, his phone has another, and I downloaded a spam list filtering app for him. I disabled the ringer for numbers not in his contact list. I did similar actions to reduce spam in his text messages. This was a good triage, but the damage is already done to his psyche. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
- 2y ago

DougN7 2y ago

I’ve been impressed with my iPhone and/or carrier (AT&T in the US) for tagging incoming calls as spam or telemarketing. The phone does still ring but I know not to answer it.

joe_the_user 2y ago

My phone number is from a different area code than I currently live in and I know no one from that area anymore. I can filter out 80% of spam just by ignoring calls from that area. I wind-up using the phone because so many organizations malevolently misfeature they websites - doing what you want to (pay basic bill or whatever) is hard but upselling and new features, those you can do instantly.

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yread 2y ago

Is this like an American thing? I'm in the Netherlands and i get like 1 spam call per two months (business internet/electricity salesperson usually)

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xyst 2y ago
America doesn’t have privacy laws that prevent robot spam. Repercussions for violating the SPAM Act are not prosecuted very often. Personally, the only “spam” I get is flagged by the cellular provider and 99% of the time the calls are silenced. Not really an issue for me. The only people that “call” me are in my contacts list anyways. Everyone else can leave a VM or text message.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  It's also far, far cheaper to make calls to US mobiles than mobiles in any other developed country. Like call termination to an EU mobile is 10x+ than a US mobile.
grardb 2y ago
Definitely. I'm American and I've lived in the Netherlands for the past three years. The difference is night and day. Whenever I visit, I switch to my US SIM card and am immediately bombarded with spam texts (mostly from political parties) and scam calls. In my experience, Android is pretty good at marking calls and texts as "potential scams," but they're still there. In the Netherlands, I've gotten a few scam attempts via WhatsApp. Other than that, I think I've received one phone call soliciting donations to the Red Cross, and nothing else.
cordenr 2y ago
In Spain I get at least 4 or 5 calls a week from different providers. Luckily at the moment, there's still a delay after you answer the call as (I assume) you're being connected to a human. How long will this last....? Currently, when I don't hear a voice within 1s or so, I hang up. A legitimate caller will (hopefully) call back pretty quick.

xyst 2y ago

> Gmail did to monetize the lock-in on your inbox This is why I have my own mail server and domain. Full control over mail, and access to features that you pay for (ie, unlimited e-mail aliases, control over mailbox size). No more worrying about “google decided to shut your free account down for whatever reason. Bye bye decades of emails and loss to services that use email based OTP or magic link login.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> If I’m on a call, even with family, it’s now almost exclusively on FaceTime/zoom/meet/etc. I really don't get that. I don't get these, on neither of my phones (I've got two numbers). When it rings, it's virtually always friends or family. Sometimes the bank/insurance/doctor. Very exceptionally do I get a commercial or scam call. I think it's not an argument good enough to excuse to excuse Authy here: "my phone already leaked, so what's one more leak!?". > Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives Oh I fully agree. I'm using Telegram for chat but zero FaceTime/meet/WhatsApp here. People want to call me, they usually phone me. Once in a rare while Telegram.

iamtheworstdev 2y ago
i'm jealous of you. I recently had a day where I got 25 phone calls. 23 were spam. Turning on iOS "ignore unrecognize phone numbers" has been amazing (i assume android has the same feature)
- graemep 2y ago
  Wow. I was wondering why people were fussing about the odd spam call! The most I have had is 2 in a day and my number is in websites, social media, whatever. Almost all spam is instantly recognisable. Mostly visa and parcel delivery scams. In do not block unknown numbers because lots of organisations use them here (UK) This includes people I really do want to be able to contact me if they want to such as the police.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    > here (UK) I think it's mostly just an issue in the US/North America
    - katbyte 2y ago
      I’m in Canada and get maybe a couple scam calls a month
- 2y ago

Angostura 2y ago

Interesting. Here in the UK I get about 1 spam phone call a year.

kccqzy 2y ago

> I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call Doctors, dentists, moving companies, home improvement contractors, recruiters, etc. These are some of the most important phone calls I've received in recent memory. I don't know what world you live in, but I religiously block phone numbers after just one spam call. And I usually don't give out my phone number. (I'm much happier giving out email addresses since I have an infinite supply of addresses.) I never get enough spam calls that I feel like the phone system is going the way of the fax machine.

averageRoyalty 2y ago
Agreed. Phone calls are quite common in my circle. Spam calls have definitely risen in the last 10 years, but the ratio is nothing like the GP.

9cb14c1ec0 2y ago

The solution to phone spam is voicemail transcription. Every call goes to voicemail, I get the transcription in a minute or two, and can call back if I want to.

sebastiennight 2y ago
With the caveat that this now adds a third-party transcriber that logs the content of every single voicemail you get. Which will definitely end up in some data breach at some point.
diebeforei485 2y ago
This is what you get on iPhone with the "Silence Unknown Callers" setting.

K0HAX 2y ago

The telephone companies make money based on minutes of usage. There is a very large financial incentive for the really big telcos to allow spam calls. Spam callers are likely the most lucrative customer of the telephone network for the telephone companies.

ternaryoperator 2y ago
> The telephone companies make money based on minutes of usage. I don't see how that could be correct. Once you pay your monthly fee, the fewer minutes you tie up the company's resources the better for them. That's true too for pay-ahead plans.
- wasmitnetzen 2y ago
  Your provider get paid by the caller's provider for taking the call, and the marginal costs of a phone call are close to zero.

ranger_danger 2y ago

IMO The problem with data breaches is not the phone number being exposed, it's the other data around it that one can combine with other breaches to make full profiles of a person's comings and goings, their location/purchase history, their associations and preferences, etc. This is very valuable data to have, not only for advertisers, but also criminals and other bad actors. Also, the fact that nobody ever questions the authenticity of leaked data should be VERY alarming. Imagine what power someone can hold over someone with manipulated leak data.

brewdad 2y ago
Doesn’t even have to be manipulated just incorrect. I share a rather uncommon name with at least two others within five years of my age. I get emails intended for either of them almost daily. One holds political views completely opposite my own. The other is rebuilding his life after a couple years in prison. I would rather not have my own life intertwined with either of them but undoubtedly it already is to some degree.

bottled_poe 2y ago

Yet another reason the digital world is marching towards a closed-by-default model.

paul7986 2y ago

The phone network we once knew is useless in terms of answering or bothering with any calls or text from those not in your contacts. If you do .. you do so at your own risk!

squigz 2y ago

> While this sucks, my phone is in so many data breaches at this point it doesn’t matter. Yes, and this is the slope that we keep sliding down with these data breaches not being taken seriously. First it was your name and email. Now phone numbers. What's the next bit of our private info that we'll normalize leaking?

hansvm 2y ago
Currently, any password from more than 6 months ago, names of all my acquaintances, photos of all my paystubs over the last 6yrs (thank you Equifax and dishonest HR platforms), .... Astounding amounts of misconduct are normalized. They're just not widely known yet.

bad_user 2y ago

I'm an European and I get zero spam calls. I used to get a couple of cold calls per year for surveys, but I got unlisted via GDPR requests and now its down to zero. Companies do try collecting your phone number, but then I answer NO to the obligatory "do you want the latest offers" question (in the EU, this is opt-in not opt-out). And it doesn't matter if my phone number leaks. This is similar to my email address use. I used to get emails from recruiters, but after a couple of replies informing them that whatever profile they have is illegal, with my email address not being public, asking them to delete it, the emails stopped. I still get spam, but it's mostly fraud and US companies. Fastmail's spam filters are good enough, BTW. My phone number works just fine, and the phone network is valuable given the better signal 2G can have, or the fact that not everyone is on the app du jour. And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp. I frequently see US folks criticising GDPR, so I'm guessing this is one of those "the US mind can't comprehend" moments.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp. Given that you're European, do you not have any friends/family outside your country, in neighboring EU countries? Wouldn't they have to pay high per-minute rates to call you?
- arkh 2y ago
  https://mobile.free.fr/fiche-forfait-free https://mobile.free.fr/fiche-forfait-free Example from one provider: nope with 100 countries. Including the US, Canada, China etc.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Looks expensive. What about the regular phone plans? For instance, the plan I use currently in Japan has high per-minute or per-SMS charges for international numbers. The trade-off, of course, is that it's dirt cheap as long as you don't call international numbers, and basically just use it for mobile data. In a place where everyone uses LINE for communication, this works well.
  - 2y ago

dapago 2y ago

I’ve found some success is curbing spam calls with the “Silence Unknown Callers” feature in iPhone. However this presents a few challenges. Mainly missing calls from delivery agents, who's number is obviously not in my iPhone contacts

raxxorraxor 2y ago

I have never shared my phone number with any online service aside from my bank and I don't get any spam on my phone. I still don't recommend to do that and just toss those that demand your phone number away. Get a business phone if your work demands it.

p51-remorse 2y ago

Easy trick: Every time you get a spam call, answer it. Talk to them until _they_ hang up. String them along. Put them on speakerphone and keep working. Feed them fake credit card numbers (there are generators out there that create numbers that checksum correctly, so they type them into whatever they're using to bill numbers. Hopefully this helps flag them as a bad actor to the processors, idk). It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious. My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good. Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.

jollofricepeas 2y ago
This works. I started doing this as well. I mimic the Jolly Roger call service and they usually hang up in less than a minute. Ex… - Act like you can’t hear them - Ask them to restart what they were saying - Start a conversation with a fictional person in the background It’s fun and makes getting spam calls enjoyable. https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ https://jollyrogertelephone.com/
- remram 2y ago
  Reminds me of Lenny: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot) That one was just a recording of an old person saying weird incomprehensible things and asking for clarification at random intervals. No AI.
grvdrm 2y ago
Incredible post. Starting this today!

tracker1 2y ago

Very similar here... same for my primary gmail address... the most annoying thing is the "credit monitoring" that comes with a few of my credit cards is all but worthless... I get constant notices that my "email is compromised" but absolutely no detail on how/where/what exactly is compromised, with is like saying, your email is public. While I do get a few regular phone calls a week, they're all in my contacts and I don't answer if the number isn't... at least 2/3 the time if I decide to answer as I'm expecting an out of band call, it's spam. On the flip side, I am wanting to setup for "your code is XXXXXX" as a verification on a personal website I'm working on to allow for public users. I know it doesn't add too much, but it's enough to reduce the noise. I'm not even sure what more hoops I need to jump through with Twilio to get to send said messages. I'm not a company, and not sending any kind of marketing campaign.

knodi 2y ago

Really? I get nearly zero spam text maybe 1-2 per year, even voice calls now. I get maybe 1 per month now. I'm with US carrier TMobile and on iOS.

gregcohn 2y ago

Anyone who has kids has to answer the phone from strangers routinely. School staff and camp counselors are routinely using their own cell phones these days to communicate with parents. Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once. The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam. In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.

EasyMark 2y ago

I feel the same way. I get far too many “hey!” Or “Hello?” “What’s up?” messages on my phone that never say another thing. Any family/friend of mine knows me well enough to try more than once to get my attention via messages, and 99% of them should probably be in my contact list already and I’ll hear the beep.