imo the best way to combat this is to answer the call and waste as much of the scammers time as possible. Call spamming only scales because most people ignore or hangup immediately. If you waste 30seconds of a scammers time thats 30 more people they cant call. And that 30 seconds costs THEM money. I just answer say “hi” to start the recording and leave the phone on my desk until they hangup. Perhaps i dont completely understand the backend but if more people wasted the scammers time it would quickly become too expensive for them to continue.
Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
51–60 of 303 posts
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#52Apple provides a fix: get an Apple Watch and make your phone silent. Then you get a notification on your watch which you can suppress by placing your hand over it. I make this comment in jest because obviously this is a very user-unfriendly "solution" unless you planned to buy an apple watch for some other reason. However I do use this feature. As for the post's comment that dismissing the call leaks info: I don't kn…
I have heard this suggested in all seriousness.
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#53It is a phone. If you need uninterrupted productivity, use any other type of personal computing device.
> It is a phone. If you need uninterrupted productivity, use any other type of personal computing device.
Phones have stopped being just phones for a while now. Modern smartphones are full fledged computing devices and are a key productivity tool for many users.
Personally I hardly even use the phone feature to justify calling my device a phone. I make maybe one or two traditional phone calls a month, as most of my day-to-day communications is done over the Internet.
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
do you iive outside the U.S.?
I like in the UK and get maybe 5 robocalls a year. I'm not at all cautious about giving out my phone number and I've had the same number for at least 10 years. Why is this such a problem in America but not elsewhere?
It's not. Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount. Like most things in the social media era, the grievances of a very vocal minority appear to be a larger group than they actually are.
For example, the title of the article tells us that robocalls are "killing us".
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#55I actually would like a regulatory solution for this. Mandate a way for me to say whether incoming calls were spam. Require my phone company to pay me money every time I get spammed. Allow my phone company to, at their option, proactively block calls from specific upstreams and/or pass the charge to the specific upstreams. Now from those incentives, the fines will naturally follow the upstreams to the source of the s…
This really is the only way to root out the problem. The carrier networks have to hold the upstream VOIP providers accountable, so the VOIP providers hold their customers who create random spoofed phone numbers accountable.
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#56AFAIK, it's still the case that I can't block everything but numbers in my contacts, right? That's all I'm asking, and it can't be that hard. Add that simple feature that should have been there ten years ago and the problem is solved for me.
You can do this, just set your phone to Do Not Disturb and then set it to "allow calls from my contacts"
I've seen that, but doesn't it take SMS/iMessages with it? IOW, I won't be notified of messages no matter who sends it? Regardless, it's just phone calls I want to block, I don't get enough spam SMS to care about who is sending it.
I guess I'm going to have to fiddle around with when the wife gets home and gather some empirical evidence.
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#57"At the telelphony-infrastructure level, it’s a supremely difficult problem that lacks a short-term fix because the underlying protocol is hopelessly insecure." This is only partly true. Technologically the solution is difficult, but it's easy from the social side as carriers can blacklist the smaller carriers that allow this fraud to take place. The real problem is that everyone except the consumer benefits from thi…
I agree there’s a lot the carriers could be accomplishing in flagging “inauthentic” behavior of network participants, the root cause of SS7’s lack of authentication and encryption will remain and the problem will fester. Yes, carriers are definitely on the hook for making things better too.
That said, the decisions in Apple's client side software are atrocious for the considerations of 2019.
Aside: No idea why my post went from #1 on HN to the third page in under 30 minutes, I thought we were having a fruitful discussion here
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#58> And disrupt they do, at a massive scale. Several billion fake calls are received each month in the US. Reports show this is a global problem, with Brazilians averaging 37 spam calls per month. Actually, I’m getting a robocall as I type this very sentence, my second today.
Is there a reason this isn't as prevalent in the UK? I get maybe 2 calls a month like this. Are robocallers in the UK more likely to get in trouble maybe? Putting this on Apple isn't addressing the core of the problem.
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#59I actually would like a regulatory solution for this. Mandate a way for me to say whether incoming calls were spam. Require my phone company to pay me money every time I get spammed. Allow my phone company to, at their option, proactively block calls from specific upstreams and/or pass the charge to the specific upstreams. Now from those incentives, the fines will naturally follow the upstreams to the source of the s…
This is a really good idea in theory but my understanding is that a lot of these calls come in from spoofed numbers. So if you're the unlucky person whose number the spammers choose to spoof that day you're already in for a giant headache - getting your phone number blocked would add insult to injury.
Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
#60Fwiw, Android actually does do this. When the phone is unlocked, calls show up as a banner. In addition, they added that new call screening option, I've been using it and so far it has worked fairly well. Also, there is some built-in call filtering and third party apps as well, though I have mostly been able to rely on the built-in filtering.
Does iOS really not have any options for filtering? I swear last time I had an iPhone (running iOS9) there was Something... but then again, I was jailbroken.
It's a bit funny that we got full web browsers on phones before proper call filtering.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but not on phones.)