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Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

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Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#241

Post by notatcomputer68 »

btilly wrote: post #41

I 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…

Busybody morality police would abuse this to deprive people of their freedom of telephone. Hard no

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#242

Post by pndy »

I'm from Poland and while I never experienced a robocall, I have to deal with telemarketers every now and then because someone somewhere shared my number against my will and while in theory the caller is obligated to disclosure how my number landed in its company database, they're often hanging up in second they're asked or pulling the "it was randomly selected" bullshit, and recently, after GDPR they're giving premium-rated phone numbers claiming that's how you can exclude your number from database which obviously doesn't work.

While singing contract for fiber connection, I had to repeat few times that I want to opt-out almost losing nerves talking with agent saying that I'm really not interested having telemarketers clogging my phone even if that means I'll miss a chance to win something - because that's how she tried to advertise that. I could either allow those calls for 5 PLN less on my bill or opt-out for same amount added to it and I did choose the latter.

Anyway, there are sites and apps which are trying to "rate" calling numbers and warn other people - most of the times they do good job.

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#243

Post by thirdsun »

nicky0 wrote: post #207
diebeforei485 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does USA have this huge problem with spam calls and most of Europe doesn't? Presumably because (1) it's much easier to find English speakers in countries where most robocalls actually originate, and (2) the same model can scale to 320M recipients with very little marginal effort.

Surely in Germany robocallers woul call people in German.

That was the point of the parent poster. Why bother with german and other much less common languages when you could just target a de facto global language that both your victims as well as those responsible for those scams know?

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#244

Post by NelsonMinar »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #4

I would love to be able to block all numbers coming from my area code and the first 3 digits of my number.. all my robo calls come from a number that looks just like mine.

That's a nice heuristic for some folks but it's a big failure on rural phone numbers. My neighbors and half the businesses I interact with all have numbers in the same prefix as my land line. For cellular numbers, you're basically talking about blocking 1000 random other cell phones in your city.

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#245

Post by Quanttek »

notatcomputer68 wrote: post #241
btilly wrote: post #41

I 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…

Busybody morality police would abuse this to deprive people of their freedom of telephone. Hard no

Here in Germany - and I believe most of Europe - these calls are illegal and that works perfectly. I have never gotten a robocall on my life and am still free to phone around as much as I want.

(Not sure how exactly they are regulated. If they're illegal by themselves or if it's a side-effect from the ban on signing contracts via phone)

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#246

Post by em-bee »

lsc wrote: post #227
em-bee wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am guessing that robocalls go after specific demographics. so people in more popular groups get more calls than others

I think there is less intelligence in the system than that. I get a lot of robocalls in Spanish, a language I do not know. (and other than living in California, there's not a lot about me that would suggest I know Spanish?) I mean, it is a small portion of my robocalls, but it's still several a week, when I answer unknown numbers. But, I get a lot of robocalls; 3 calls a day is light. So clearly, some people get more…

that, or the source data is not very good. maybe you got a phone number used by a person of spanish origin before.

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#247

Post by aembleton »

snowwrestler wrote: post #127

My solution to robocalls is to answer them and then be totally silent. After a few seconds, they disconnect. The number of robocalls I receive has plummeted since I started doing this. I receive hardly any these days. My theory is that due to silent answers, the autodialers eventually mark the number as bad, or as a machine-answered number. I have no proof of this, though.

I just say 'Yes' after each question. Robo-caller puts me through to human where I continue to say Yes. Eventually they cotton on and hang up.

Hopefully they will blacklist me and no longer annoy me.

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#248

Post by cesarb »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #198
justinator wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) 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 particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.) ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other le…

Impressive. Are you using a framework of sorts to provide this answer?

It's a classic template: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

The Last-Modified header says it's from early 2004.

Re: Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us

#249

Post by hu3 »

dilap wrote: post #104
mikestew wrote: post #9

AFAIK, 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.

Yes, this, exactly. It's mind-boggling you can't do this. (You can kind of, sort of approximate it w/ do-not-disturb mode, but turns off other notifications too, unfortunately. It needs to just be a separate option. I have zero interest in picking up calls from non-contacts in real-time.)

There are Android apps that block calls from non-contact numbers. Including open-source apps on GitHub. Maybe there are such apps for iOS also? It baffles me that this functionality isn't built-in.

edit: Nevermind I can block non-contact calls in Do Not Disturb mode in the LG phone I'm using: https://i.imgur.com/ZcRSXlK.png Maybe iOS DnD has this too?

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