Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

lemonde.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 527 posts

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#271

Post by inigyou »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #266
Frieren wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> short of a government regulation or a monopoly, Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.

On this topic, phone lines are so ubiquitous that it is irresponsible for representative governments to continue to let private companies mess around with them. Doubly irresponsible to go from public to private after the increase in popularity.

That was in the 2000s. Phone lines are an anomaly now but cellphones are not. The phone number is more like an ICQ number than an identifier of a physical connection, but is still regulated like the latter.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#272

Post by AnssiH »

elfly wrote: post #203
4bpp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.

It would work until you need to route an international call. And there's a lot of telemarketing and scams happening across country lines. I mean, they should still do it. It's just the first problem they'd face.

In Finland international inbound calls using Finnish caller ID are simply blocked (mandated by regulation since 2023).

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#276

Post by pmontra »

tecleandor wrote: post #201
Kon5ole wrote: post #11

Great idea! Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage. A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs…

Can't remember right now if it's a EU or a Spain thing, but here they made mandatory to use real numbers on the Caller ID, so you can't use fake or hidden numbers for telemarketing. That way, of you're abusing, your line can easily be tracked, blocked or fined. There has been some waves of spammer calls, more like "fake job offer calls" or things like that, coming from cell phone numbers, and there's still some telem…

It happened in Italy too (and we also had the fake job offer calls.) Suddenly I got spam calls from France and Spain and not anymore from Italian mobile numbers.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#278

Post by alistairSH »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #263
alistairSH wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams. And the rest are political calls, which are exempt. This the most annoying, come election time, I get 5-6 texts or calls per day asking for money or votes.

> From what I can tell, many/most of my “telemarketing” calls are really scams. Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other. Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle…

100% agree. When I said scam above, I meant the obviously illegal fraudulent scams (like the "We're MS, and see you have a virus, please give us your CC info and let us remote into your desktop" stuff).

Because I'm on the DNC list in the US, I don't get many/any legal telemarketing calls.

The political stuff is really annoying because very little of it is directly from the campaigns themselves. It's all push polls and PACs and whatnot.

Re: France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

#280

Post by Marciplan »

embedding-shape wrote: post #166
Kon5ole wrote: post #11

Great idea! Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones. 99.9% of all calls are an attempt to get money, and the 0.1% that's a dentist appointment, a friend that changed numbers or whatever become collateral damage. A ban is the right idea but I wonder how they can handle it, logistically. I think there needs…

In Spain we have something called "Lista Robinson" (in Sweden exists something similar, called "NIX-registret") which are basically opt-in lists where you can enter your phone number, then once the new lists been distributed, the telemarketing companies cannot call you, if they're doing things properly. If they call anyway, you just mention you're on the list, they hang up, and remove your number from the list they h…

those lists exist everywhere. They don’t really work so well :)
Post reply on HN