191–200 of 386 posts
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These outfits are often working under the protection of the local authorities thanks to rampant bribery.
That's why the initiative has to come from outside.
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Unfortunately political messages have an exception in the laws involved here. Also, my understanding is that this isn’t even a case of the politicians making an exception for themselves but for this being protected speech, so there are legal issues with blocking it without the kind of majorities American congress is not capable of anymore.
I don't see how there could be an argument for protected speech here. The constitution protects your ability to petition the government, not the government's ability to petition you.
The spammer can see the read receipt, so even if you don't respond, just viewing the message itself is a "response".
Read receipts should be disabled for unknown numbers by default.
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I find it such a weird thing, maybe it's nice in some cases, but really this is a weird mechanism. Phone numbers are exchanged a lot and repurposed. Most providers/carriers will likely have a do-not-use-for-x-amount-of-time bin to put newly reclaimed numbers in, but after a while, it will always be re-used. hence this kind of issue can happen. In my country there's a place to register to disallow unsolicited marketin…
The US has a 'Do Not Call' registry for unsolicited phone calls, but technically doesn't need one for texts because it's illegal to send marketing texts without prior consent in the first place. Thing is, 'consent' often just means failing to notice a checkbox during a signup flow or something, so people end up getting junk anyway. Even more annoyingly, politicians wrote in an exception for themselves. In combination…
A Golden Rule of the internet says that you should never reply to unwanted texts on any medium: - stalkers and trolls live off reactions, both positive and negative ones - spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side - colleagues and friends will hate you because everybody thinks they're important Replying only has negative effects. Use client-side filtering, kill files, blocking functions…
Except that STOP is handled at the carrier level and isn't even returned to the sender. It's effectively a mandated block command.
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I wish anyone from actblue would see this. I gave a few small donations and foolishly didn’t use a disposable email address. That was over four years ago and I’m still getting over a dozen spam emails a day from candidates I have never even heard of. Maybe there is some central actblue list I can opt out of but I don’t even think I created an account with them Never donated a penny since
Your campaign donations are a matter of public record and Actblue harvests them and repackages them to sell to political campaigns and operatives. It's a shitty business model that preys upon an unfortunate part of federal law that most donors don't know about.
What happens is that the campaign you donate to to puts you on their list (allowed) and then shares that list with others in the party (also allowed). They share back and forth so fast you can't get out of it.
This is why it's the email that's shared not the name. FEC records don't have your email attached to to them, but the spam still follows unique emails like "candidate@customdomain.com".
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For short codes in the USA, it technically does not have to be. And in fact businesses have to regularly check for requests even like "please don't send me messages" to be compliant.
> And in fact businesses have to regularly check for requests even like "please don't send me messages" to be compliant. That's only vaguely true. The FCC has effectively said "here's a list of words that are considered reasonable opt out words and let the courts decide what is reasonable when there is a dispute." [0] They're basically deferring to the courts to determine reasonableness. Obviously it's a good practic…
Yikes. The lawyer dog comes to mind (a Fifth and Sixth Amendment Supreme Court case). Suspect speaks voluntarily to police until he realizes they suspect him of a crime. He stops and says, "I want a lawyer, dawg." What is meant to happen then is that the interrogation is stopped until that point. Police carried on the interrogation, and the Court ruled that statements he made in that period of time were admissible in securing a conviction against him.
When this was appealed, the Louisiana Supreme Court declined to hear it, saying, with a completely straight face, that there was ambiguity, and that since the police could reasonably believe that he was in fact asking for a canine lawyer, i.e. Lawyer McDog, Esquire, and that they couldn't find such an attorney, there was no invocation of counsel that warranted a termination of the interview.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it such a weird thing, maybe it's nice in some cases, but really this is a weird mechanism. Phone numbers are exchanged a lot and repurposed. Most providers/carriers will likely have a do-not-use-for-x-amount-of-time bin to put newly reclaimed numbers in, but after a while, it will always be re-used. hence this kind of issue can happen. In my country there's a place to register to disallow unsolicited marketin…
The US has a 'Do Not Call' registry for unsolicited phone calls, but technically doesn't need one for texts because it's illegal to send marketing texts without prior consent in the first place. Thing is, 'consent' often just means failing to notice a checkbox during a signup flow or something, so people end up getting junk anyway. Even more annoyingly, politicians wrote in an exception for themselves. In combination…
It is unfortunately seemingly not illegal to send me political beg-texts multiple times per day, though.
A Golden Rule of the internet says that you should never reply to unwanted texts on any medium: - stalkers and trolls live off reactions, both positive and negative ones - spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side - colleagues and friends will hate you because everybody thinks they're important Replying only has negative effects. Use client-side filtering, kill files, blocking functions…
> - spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side For real spam, sure, but for semi-legitimate spam like real businesses and political fundraising, I'm not sure this is actually true. I have found replying with STOP did reduce the volume of political spam I was getting. I think it makes intuitive sense that they should try to respect opt-out signals: you don't want to piss off the people yo…
I don’t distinguish anymore. There is no such thing as a legitimate spammer. If you contact me without my consent, you are at best a nuisance and at worst a threat. You get marked as spam if E-mail, and blocked+trashed otherwise. I really wish SMS and iMessage had a way to mark senders as spammers.