Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election • Hacker News Board

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#141

Post by taejo » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #140

panzagl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of everybody's incoming calls are spam bots.

I've never been robocalled, but I've had "microsoft support" scammers call me once. I'm in Sweden. Not sure if the difference between 90% and 0% is technological or legislative.

Presumably if the Swedish tax authority called you, they'd speak to you in Swedish, and you'd be suspicious if they couldn't. So if you wanted to run this scam on Swedish targets, you'd need to find a bunch of Swedish speakers willing to work for low wages doing something unethical and illegal. AFAIK, the only country with significant number of Swedish speakers is Sweden, a fairly wealthy country, and also the country where you'd be running the scam, vastly increasing the legal risk.

On the other hand, there are countries which are poor, not the US, and have lots of English speakers, and these scams tend to be run from those countries, at least according to the callers' accents.

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#142

Post by dwc » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 1:43 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #138

dwc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoofed Caller ID is a lie, not anonymity. Here's a proposal: 1) Caller may choose to hide/suppress their Caller ID, 2) mandatory option for phone carriers to allow Callee to completely block calls (no ring, no voicemail) that don't carry Caller ID, 3) When present Caller ID must be accurate. The above allows anonymity but disallows deceit. It also provides opt-out for people not to receive anonymous calls. (Anonymit…

If we want authentication, public-private key pairs are a great idea. A trusted network is fine, but are the telephone networks trusted? Can't get them to implement simple features in our interests, doesn't seem very much like a trusted third party to me. Meanwhile, OTT services work. Some let you whitelist contacts. Killer features like that will push everyone off POTS eventually anyway. Inertia and legacy will keep…

> A trusted network is fine, but are the telephone networks trusted?

In the old days there was an assumption that if you were in the network then you were trusted, which was always dicey but made more sense when Ma Bell controlled everything tightly. Since the monopoly breakup that model was no longer true, and many problems can trace back to the nature of back patching security onto an entirely different model that no longer fits reality.

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#143

Post by matty22 » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #2

I'm all for this...but can we just ban telemarketing entirely? Why is that even allowed? I've always thought that the law should be written such that telemarketing is legal, but if you engage in it, it is no longer illegal to murder you. You can do it, but you lose your murder protection.

While we're at it, could we make it illegal for companies to fill my physical mailbox with garbage? Junk mail is a blight on the planet. It's literally just turning trees into garbage with no intermediary step of added value.

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#144

Post by wilde » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #2

I'm all for this...but can we just ban telemarketing entirely? Why is that even allowed? I've always thought that the law should be written such that telemarketing is legal, but if you engage in it, it is no longer illegal to murder you. You can do it, but you lose your murder protection.

Because calling people is an important GOTV activity. They’re not going to write a law that hurts their ability to campaign.

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#145

Post by puranjay » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #27

puranjay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who developed democracy never accounted for the weapons grade marketing and persuasion we are capable of today.

What do you mean? Eloquence and persuasive methods have existed at least since Antiquity (just look at the records of Plato in Greece). What it takes to believe any kind of BS is just the absence of critical thinking. This is the real root cause.

I really doubt that pure eloquence can compete with the visual smorgasbord that modern marketers can create, all learned after spending billions on mass market advertising over decades.

Plato couldn't laser-target his message to 5,000 different segments carefully curated with an extensive re-marketing campaign.

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#146

Post by tonyquart » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 6:06 AM UTC

I have just read an article about someone who won a lawsuit against telemarketers at http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-telemarkete.... I think people could try this way to make some of them think twice before they harass us with their unwanted calls.

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#147

Post by mahasvin » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

mythrowaway1124 wrote: post #76

mahasvin wrote: post #71

So, robots have no rights to convey messages to humans? Is that so? It might be a wiser option to enhance control over ownership of robots instead.

Why should robots have any rights at all?

You never read Asimov or Lem, weren't you? Robots should have rights, if they can make choices.

Re: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemarketing and influencing election

#148

Post by kmlx » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 1:13 PM UTC

travmatt wrote: post #8

kmlx wrote: post #6

I've been wanting to build an online-only bot of myself for some time. This bot would impersonate me and interact with any service provided over the internet, such as banks, government, even ordering a cab. It could both write and speak just as well as I do and would act on my behalf. I can handle potential issues personally. Would this scenario fall under this law?

The bill states that if you specificy that it’s a bot then it’s fine.

the whole reason behind such a system would be so that the other parties don't know that they're conversing with an ai representation of myself. otherwise they'll just ask for me instead.