201–210 of 244 posts
The only solution I can think of is that everyone start using one-time numbers.
You still have a main number and a number "domain service". When you call someone you get a new number, the call receiver can get your name out of the "domain service" only if you have that number in your address book.
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Same here. Another dark pattern is they require the country code, they could have inferred it from my IP and auto populated it or had a list of countries via a dropdown instead they bury that the country code is required in a paragraph and disable the button if the phone number lacks it. At very least enable the button and pop up a error message if the country code is lacking. How many non technical users will give u…
I don't think it's the case that your country code can be reliably inferred from your IP. When I lived in Europe, I had a German phone number but was frequently living/working in other countries.
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I don't think that holds up to evidence. In tribes largely untouched by civilisation blood revenge is still fairly common. These are social norms, but without a neutral judge one party might execute revenge, the other party doesn't see their fault and instead retaliates, and you get an endless circle of bloodshed (which has killed entire tribes). One of the major achievements making civilisation possible is a judge o…
> One of the major achievements making civilisation possible is a judge or court that can decide who is right and and who is wrong, preventing BS from spiraling in endless retaliation and counter-retatiation. Well, no? Isn't that what is called "war"? You might argue that frequency of conflicts is lower, though I would be sceptical of that without further proof.
Having a transnational judicial system in the EU (as the most recently formed example) allows coorperation and trade to a much greater extend. Sure, the EU might go to war at some point, but the circle of people and corperations you can trust to respect law and written contracts is very big, no matter if a war is going on or not.
This article focuses on the problems that truecaller poses for 'non-users". As a non-user of truecaller in India myself, I find myself in the minority. It seems I get none of the benefits (improved spam filtering, the chance to see who is calling me), and in the 'prisoners dilemma' sense, it appears I would loose nothing by installing it, because they already have my contact information. However, this is only half th…
If you're a non-user and do not wish your information to appear on the app, you can unlist your number here - https://www.truecaller.com/unlisting Though I do not agree with the method where as a non-user I need to manually opt-out of the service, it does seem to work. My number is no longer visible on the app.
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Let's go back to the world where there is no internet. Imagine someone spreads a rumor about you. Or a praise. People might have heard this, before they even met you. It can be illegal, harmful, or beneficial, but it's under the control of the people you interact with. If you meet someone for the first time, and the person heard from someone that you're dealing drugs, and you tell her you don't, and ask them where th…
Truecaller is one of those "it just works" apps. It is completely transparent to the user. You can use it as a dialer to make and receive calls. A lot of people don't understand that it's silently uploading their contact lists, personal information and call behavior off to the internet. The customer service agent in the article from truecaller is correct about the usefulness of the app. A friend of mine was able to t…
At least in the case of the tags, is that true? How do they think it works then when they get a call from a new number and it has the person's name / other information?
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GDPR is 100% necessary and fundamentally a good idea. It has a lot of problems that just show how incompetent politicians can get on a bad day, but that doesn't invalidate the core idea.
It has a lot of problems that just show how incompetent politicians can get on a bad day Mind elaborating on them? The only potential issue, which I see, is some ambigiouty. However, I don't see how you could craft a legal frame work without some ambiguity, which needs to be resolved by the courts at one point. Unless your business model is dreck, I really don't see any issues with the GDPR as such.
The main reason for that is Article 27.
For an organization that does not have a presence in the EU but for which GDPR applies, it seems to cost a minimum of around $500/year to comply. That seems to be the low end for the services that provide Article 27 representation.
That might not be too bad...as long as only the EU implements such privacy legislation. But several countries have talked about similar privacy legislation. If they all have something like GDPR's Article 27, it could quickly get out of hand.
You don't need an Article 27 representative if all of the following apply to your processing of personal data:
• the processing is occasional,
• it does not include, on a large scale, processing of certain special categories of data or personal data related to criminal convictions and offenses, and
• it is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons.
There's a lot of fuzziness in that. Even if other countries have similar exceptions, each country might resolve the fuzziness a different way, which could make it a major pain to figure out for which countries you need a representative.
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If Robocalls are the problem, Truecaller isn't the solution. Regulations against unwanted harassment is. Robocalls are not a force of nature where our only recourse is a technological solution. They are a result of a human choice, where the absolute majority of individual think it's a menace. So our recourse is legal. band-aid solutions like Truecaller cause more problems. The Truecaller product is not a usual commod…
In essence, this is the spam debate all over again, with some extra seasoning. (The permissions are incidental - other apps exist that are polite in this respect.) So, out comes the canned spam response: Your post advocates a ( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your partic…
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> They send a SMS to any non-user whose number is entered to warn them someone is attempting to enter their number and ask them for consent. This would also be an opportunity to inform them about the unlisting option
For this to be effective in cases like the one in the story, the SMS would have to be sent almost as soon as the attempt is made to add the number.
In many cases, that would allow the person whose number is being added to infer who tried to add it. If the caller is involved in some criminal activity, that could be dangerous for the person who tried to tag them in some parts of the world.