for those that want to go down the rabbit hole of what this feature is - see https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sms_and_call_reporting/getting_up-to-dat

for those that want to go down the rabbit hole of what this feature is - see https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sms_and_call_reporting/getting_up-to-date_calling_and_blocking_information_for_your_app https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sms_and_call_repor... (and links from there). It seems (at a very high level) for 3rd parties to be able to hook into the incoming phone call path and filter what a user might see based on data of a server they control. I don't quite understand it (so would be happy if people could fill me in). My naive guess is that this is to prevent such a service from getting a phone number, and instead get a blob that one can work on via HME means. That seems obviously wrong though, because if I'm using this encrypted blob to look up phone # data to return (spam et al) metadata to the user, presumably I created the data set locally, so could associate the incoming blob to an actual number then.