While this sucks, my phone is in so many data breaches at this point it doesn’t matter.
The spam-to-ham ratio on my phone number is now far worse than any other channel for me. The traditional phone network is at risk of going the way of the fax machine if we don’t do something about the spam problem like we did with email.
If I’m on a call, even with family, it’s now almost exclusively on FaceTime/zoom/meet/etc. I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call. Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives — once they capture the market fully they will eventually dump ads all over your calls. Don’t believe me? Just look at what Gmail did to monetize the lock-in on your inbox.
Doctors and dentists.
Most of the calls I get are spam, but then the MOST important calls I get are from doctors, labs, and dentists. I do as much as possible online of course, but not all of these professionals have good online systems and phone calls are often required.
Sometimes you know what number they're going to be calling from ahead of time, but often you don't... especially if you're in a large medical network that has different offices for different specialists, etc. It's a really sad situation if you get sick and you're trying not to miss these important calls, especially when it's a long wait for a specialist and then you miss their call when they get to your name on the waiting list.
This will literally cost some people their lives and legislators need to act on making spoof calls impossible -- there's no reason why anyone should be allowed to spoof a number that they can't receive calls at.
I recently had to help my father organize his medical visits.
Dealing with his healthcare providers was a bit of a pain, but it was way worse because he has stopped answering calls, primarily because of the call spam rate. I think because he owns his own business, he never fails to hand out his contact info when he is shopping, and he owns his own business (so his contact info is published by the city).
His phone provider has a feature to opt into spam filtering, his phone has another, and I downloaded a spam list filtering app for him. I disabled the ringer for numbers not in his contact list. I did similar actions to reduce spam in his text messages.
This was a good triage, but the damage is already done to his psyche. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
Why not get a second sim? Most phones can have 2 sims active, and a phone / text only plan is dirt cheap (3-6$/m).
Offer the second number with much greater discretion.
I don't know about most phones supporting that, probably depends on the market.
But best I can tell, 80% of my spam calls are just war dialing; a new number would get war dialed just as much. Probably wouldn't get collections calls for my deadbeat cousin though.
Physical dual-SIM support is very market based (Popular in Asia).
I believe most reasonably modern phones should support at least one active eSIM in addition to the physical SIM now.
That's the worst! I had a collection agency keep calling consistently for a particular family member.
I got fed up, told the caller that I hadn't seen her in years and she could be dead in a ditch for all I knew, then asked if he could call me if he got a hold of her.
They never called again.
I switched to low population area codes and that helped a lot. Currently getting 0-3/mo.
308 is low pop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_308
I do basically this with a subscription to MySudo. I always get funny looks when giving out a number, living in a small town people are surprised when it isn't one of the two or three area codes around here.
It works like a charm though. I have three tiers of numbers - one that I'll keep and goes to only friends and family, one that I will likely keep for a couple years until it starts getting too much spam, and a third tier that I cycle regularly and use for one off things like online orders.
Distant area code SIMs do wonders.
I was still living in Vancouver, Canada when I learned maybe six or so years ago AT&T has removed all roaming restrictions in North America. So a few of us banded together, one of us crossed over to New York picked up a group subscription of sorts and we had very cheap subscriptions. Only the last 1-2 years did Canadian providers caught up, somewhat.
But the real advantage was if anyone called from a "local" number, local to my SIM at least, I immediately knew it was spam. I do not know anyone in Buffalo, I do not do business in Buffalo, there's no authority which has anything to do with me there, nothing. It's spam.
Reminds me of my parents... they live close enough to the US border that they just have a US cell phone plan. The plan is $50/mo/line USD and includes unlimited data/calling/text in Canada/US/Mexico. But because they live so close they're not actually roaming most of the time, and they're snow birds so they're in the US half the year anyway. They found the same thing as you... any calls from the same area code as their phone numbers was definitely not for them since it was somewhere very far away and they don't have any business there.
From experience it seems to be semi-random.
I've never had a single spam call on my main phone number, but friends who have got a new number get maybe 20 spam calls per day, with only having given their number to their closest friends and family.
I think one factor that weighs in heavily is if your contacts download thousands of spam apps onto their phones and click YES to every permission. Then your phone number is harvested from your contact's phone and sold. TikTok, for instance, will beg me multiple times on a frequent basis to see my contacts. I don't think you can even install WhatsApp without giving it your entire phone book, can you?
That doesn't always work. A lot of phone numbers out there are "dirty": they are on various marketing lists and will get spam calls and texts.
Some carriers do try to keep excessively dirty numbers inactive for a while after a customer cancels a plan and returns the number, in the hopes that the spam will fall off after to many "this number is disconnected" responses.
But sometimes they don't bother, and sometimes it just doesn't help all that much, because spammers are just running through the phone number space.
This is a long way of saying that even getting a new number doesn't always work. The number you end up with might already be inundated with spam.
I haven't answered my phone for anyone not in my VIP list in a year or two.
I can see when someone is calling and in realtime see them leaving a voicemail via speech-to-text and pick up the call if I want but 99.999% of the time it's spam.
Th topic of this subthread is exactly that one cannot rely on the contact list method because doctors may call from any unknown number. Maybe you haven’t had to deal with that (yet), but once you do you’ll realize that your method doesn’t work for that.
Same with home repair contractors. The person coming over to do the work is unlikely to call from the same number the business hands out that rings an office manager or the owner. Same goes for the person calling me back with an estimate I requested.
For contractors, this is where SMS tends to come in a lot as they'll usually text if they cannot get a voice call through, which helps.
For doctors offices, it's a whole different bag and a true pain... you'll get voicemails with half a message that has none of the important details.
I have a business with a published phone number and I probably get 20 spam calls a day, at least half of which leave “voicemails,” some of which are just really loud high pitched noises for whatever reason.
It’s absolutely ridiculous. I wish I would have used a different number than my personal one back when I had started.
If our government can’t protect us from spam calls, how can they can protect us from anything else?
That sounds like fax spam.
Depending on his age the business may be a red herring.
Shady outbound call based operations purchase, trade, and mine data all day long. You can have Equifax directly sell you reams of demographic specific contact information. God help anyone who ordered from a catalog.
My grandparents received easily 30 scam/spam calls a day. Mostly from Medicare scammers and sketchy organizations that operate right at the edge of illegality. Not even counting the outright fraudulent “Microsoft Support” scams.
Which app did you use ( I seem to have similar issue with my other parent )?
Getting a new, out of state number can sometimes help.
My phone is out of state due to my previous address, and 95% of spam i get is spoofed to that old town or the surrounding area.
No doctors office/etc calls me from that area. It works pretty nice
The problem with that idea is that when you make local calls, people think that you are the spammer.
I too have an out-of-state number after having moved, and I can definitely confirm that when I make a local call, some people will not pick up after seeing the unusual area code on their caller ID. They told me so.
There's another problem too: Even when I leave voicemail for a local business (plumber, dentist, replying to a "for sale" ad), some people will be thinking, Why does this guy need a plumber or want to buy my kayak if they live 1500 miles away?
I've resorted to leaving an explanation saying "Even though my area code is XYZ, I'm in the same city as you".
I moved from British Columbia (250 area code) to the Montreal suburbs (450 area code). The one digit difference was a huge issue: the number of times businesses and government agencies would helpfully "correct" my phone number when I gave it to them or when they tried to call it meant I missed a substantial number of important phone calls. I get it, my French isn't the greatest and I have a thick Anglo accent, but "deux cinq zéro" sounds very different from "quatre cinq zéro." Eventually I just gave up and got a local number (I ported my old one to VOIP.ms and forwarded it so I wouldn't miss calls).
Wow that seems crazy to me. I grew up in the northeastern US where even 3 decades ago, before a large expansion, we had 7 area codes within an hour drive. It would be bizarre to make such an assumption about someone, even then. When I lived in Boston, there was tons. Eastern Massachusetts alone has 339, 351, 508, 617, 774, 781, 857, and 978 as local area codes.
Almost all of the spam calls I receive have the same area code as my phone, which is in a different state from where I currently live.
These people who don't pick up for an unusual area code: don't they know that spammers are more likely to call from a "usual" area code? Am I mistaken?
Exactly, and not just the same area code, the spammers often have the same prefix as my phone number too... so it looks like someone "just around the corner".
The area code wouldn’t be a red flag for me, but this absolutely would.
It's high time someone disrupted the damn desk phone network of these hospitals. It's definitely not a technical hurdle in 2024. All calls go on the data network. You route your calls out of the main router and any call that gets routed in such manner will have the ID of the router. Tag the router id to the hospital or hotel and be done with.
Is it not this simple ? With dual SIMs any phone can serve 2 lines so employees officially switch to the hospital e-sim within the hospital premises.
It's an american problem. Spam calls aren't a big issue in Germany.
Complain to your government.
Not sure, I get them in france at the very least twice a week. Other people I know complain about the same thing.
I settled on never answering my phone if not in my contact list, if the caller is not a spammer they leave a voicemail.
It’s a huge problem in India. 10 times worse than US.
I never get spam calls, but I do get a lot of spam SMS messages - also in Germany. (They're almost always fake 2FA activation messages from some bank I'm not a customer of)
Or maybe telecommunications in general need disruption. Instead of having a number that anyone in the world can call, I should provide an abstract identity to a contact. When I approve that entity to contact me, and they get a unique identifier that only their identity can use to contact me, I decide how important their calls are to me:
1. Phone rings no matter what (doctors and other high profile contacts that I do not want to miss a call from)
2. Phone rings unless sleep mode active (family/friends). A second call within 3 minutes rings through in case of emergency.
3. Call goes straight to pre-recorded message (generic or unique to that identity) that tells them to text me their message/request (or when AI gets good enough, and it doesn't seem like it there yet for all accents, it transcribes their voicemail message).
4. Caller can leave a message but it is completely ignored by me and I don't know they left a message unless I go and check my spam folder.
I can change the call handling of any identity at any time, and there should also be an email and text message layer on top of this system so the same rules apply and I choose who can contact me with those methods as well.
I have a dedicated phone I use solely for healthcare.
The number in my main phone changes every 90 days.
I get a new starter SIM every month.
Doctors and dentists are shifting to apps with integrated VoIP calls and dropping PSTN.
And I really like that. Instead of having to use some social network product just to receive my lab results.
Or we may end up in a world when doctors send us important Tiktoks.
Social services are another example. Many services are county-administered and thus don't have a centralized online platform. As always our most vulnerable populations suffer the most from techno-greed. Not the families of software engineers who built the system.
I think a whole lot more people still make regular phone calls than the ones who don't. Anyone who runs a business for example is usually on the phone ALL the time.
Where I live, they moved to Whatsapp (dentist) and dedicated app (public hospitals) for messaging and notification.
How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.
Advertising is a cancer on modern society. It will metastasize to any new communications medium, public or private, and destroy it from within. People will switch to new medium that offer less spam, but advertisers quickly follow to strip-mine the new channel. A cycle of life, so to speak.
I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two separate things in my book.
However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.
It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago.
Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!
This process has a descriptive name, enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and it seems to apply to most internet services.
That might be the trendy term for it now, but the strategy is as old as time.
In old school economic terms its called "dumping." When international trade started becoming a major thing, aspiring monopolists would flood foreign markets with goods sold below-cost to push out local competitors, then ratchet up prices and reduce quality once they'd captured the market (basically the Google strategy).
Just like crypto people had to learn that financial regulation was in place for a reason, internet people have had to learn that industrial age anti-trust rules were also put in place for a reason. Now we just need to enforce them.
You should, honestly.
It’s also so annoying circular. We spend money to get more clients but this stops being effective at a certain point so now you’re just spending money to advertise for the sake of it or the status, and could even be losing money by doing so.
In my experience, the fear of missing out is a big driver for companies to continue to throw good money after bad in marketing. Maybe Facebook ads aren't driving as much traffic to your company as it used to, but if you give it up and all your competitors still use it it's pretty understandable to worry about falling behind the market.
Agreed. Advertising is psychological manipulation. I would be happy if all forms of it were just outlawed.
"Our democratically controlled communication infrastructure" honestly deserves to be deprecated and replaced with some kind of federated voice system that comes out of the IETF instead of the telcos. What kind of antediluvian nonsense doesn't use end-to-end encryption in 2024?
AT&T has a long history with three letter agencies. If they ever did implement e2e encryption it would certainly come with backdoors that make it e2e only by name.
All the more reason to have the IETF do it and leave AT&T out of it.
Any modern system is going to use IP as a transport. Even the traditional phone network is VoIP under the hood in modern networks. The replacement system should be kept as far from the influence of the last mile providers as possible.
The thing that definitely shouldn't happen is that you get your phone number from them. Let it be "user@host" like email or otherwise assigned via DNS.
Is our communication infrastructure democratically controlled? At least in the US, we may have federal regulators but isn't the infrastructure still owned by a few massive telecoms corporations?
I really don't get that. I don't get these, on neither of my phones (I've got two numbers). When it rings, it's virtually always friends or family. Sometimes the bank/insurance/doctor. Very exceptionally do I get a commercial or scam call.
I think it's not an argument good enough to excuse to excuse Authy here: "my phone already leaked, so what's one more leak!?".
Oh I fully agree. I'm using Telegram for chat but zero FaceTime/meet/WhatsApp here. People want to call me, they usually phone me. Once in a rare while Telegram.
i'm jealous of you. I recently had a day where I got 25 phone calls. 23 were spam. Turning on iOS "ignore unrecognize phone numbers" has been amazing (i assume android has the same feature)
Wow. I was wondering why people were fussing about the odd spam call! The most I have had is 2 in a day and my number is in websites, social media, whatever.
Almost all spam is instantly recognisable. Mostly visa and parcel delivery scams.
In do not block unknown numbers because lots of organisations use them here (UK) This includes people I really do want to be able to contact me if they want to such as the police.
I think it's mostly just an issue in the US/North America
I’m in Canada and get maybe a couple scam calls a month
Occasionally I'll get spam from numbers in my contacts. I got a virtual kidnapping call from my wife's number the other day, which would have been terrifying if she wasn't sitting right next to me.
I have 5+ spam calls every day. Looking at my call history it’s been that way as far back as it lets me scroll. Blocking doesn’t make a ton of difference, as it’s almost always a different number.
I don’t understand what they are calling for either. I’ve answered a few and most of the time it’s a dead line when I answer. Just silence.
Those are usually robo dialers looking for active numbers to resell to spammers/scammers. You answering puts you on their good list. These are also the calls that never leave any type of voicemail. I’m not sure what list VM gets you on.
This sounds intuitive, but isn't true in my experience. It's a natural consequence of aggressive dialing with a limited pool of agents. See my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40882163
The primary operating goal of a predictive dialing system is minimizing agent downtime. Ideally, when an agent transitions into being ready to talk, they want as little time as possible before they're connected to a live lead.
In above-board telemarketing, where there's a finite list of leads instead of 000-000-0000 through 999-999-9999, the administrator will adjust dialing aggressiveness to minimize the chance that a lead picks up the phone but no agent is available to take the call. Because when that happens, the answering party experiences nothing but dead air, followed by a timeout, and a hangup.
The one nice consequence from this, though, is that if you do answer a spam call and get connected to a live person, chances are very high that several other potential marks got dead air instead. Maybe you saved grandma for another day.
I think that is intentional, AFAIK phone communication is more protected than other types so allowing spam to continue unabated is in the governments interest. Outsourcing the harassment to 3rd parties, similar to how prison torture is outsourced to the inmates. The government could fix these things but would rather not.
I think we just don't have very much competition in telecommunications so things never get fixed. Why bother? It's easier to extract rent off largely the same offerings as the rest of your market (difficult to understand pricing tiers that function as a congestion tax more than a transaction, often region-specific monopolies or duopolies, indistinguishable quality of service) and bring home large profits, market efficiency damned.
Yes, I'm exaggerating. No, it's not by much.
Almost no-one is pro-spam, it’s pretty much universally hated, and in many cases it’s already illegal so it’s more of a matter of enforcement. It is also trivial to detect.
Sure there probably is some regulatory capture but if anything at all can be regulated it’s spam calls / messages. If the government can’t regulate spam then what could it be expected to regulate.
The general population is increasing worried about scam calls for their elderly relatives, it’s already a big deal.
In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam: spammers, obviously, and the entities that provide them services from which they may spam.
Oh sure basically any provider of any service be it phone, web hosting, email, etc. will say they don't want spammers, and the email providers may actually mean it what with them not wanting their server's scores trashed and be unable to get email to anyone (though plenty others don't give a shit), but website hosts, telephone companies, and SMS providers? They utterly do not care and in fact go out of their way to not know when spammers are (mis)using their services.
Meanwhile like that other commenter said, everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity. I doubt they're conspiring in a dark room somewhere, but neither side is going to upset at the other in that situation.
Not quite. For example politicians benefit from being able to solicit donations over mass text.
Hence my other example of the inability to police prisons enough to prevent abuse, I didn't allege an explicit scheming but a happy little accident. Allowing a problem to fester when it benefits you is totally normal and expected behavior. But if there is a role for government at all it would be regulate such dysfunctions.
The (US) government does an excellent job of regulating many things, such as commercial airplane design and construction. Oh wait...
Email is easier to mitigate spam with. The whole body of the message is given upfront.
It's easy now. It was an unsolved problem two decades ago.
And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. Like in our great Red Tape Europe, even with uptick in recent years we have a tiny fraction of spam calls compared to the United States.
I'm an European and I get zero spam calls.
I used to get a couple of cold calls per year for surveys, but I got unlisted via GDPR requests and now its down to zero.
Companies do try collecting your phone number, but then I answer NO to the obligatory "do you want the latest offers" question (in the EU, this is opt-in not opt-out). And it doesn't matter if my phone number leaks.
This is similar to my email address use. I used to get emails from recruiters, but after a couple of replies informing them that whatever profile they have is illegal, with my email address not being public, asking them to delete it, the emails stopped. I still get spam, but it's mostly fraud and US companies. Fastmail's spam filters are good enough, BTW.
My phone number works just fine, and the phone network is valuable given the better signal 2G can have, or the fact that not everyone is on the app du jour. And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp.
I frequently see US folks criticising GDPR, so I'm guessing this is one of those "the US mind can't comprehend" moments.
Given that you're European, do you not have any friends/family outside your country, in neighboring EU countries? Wouldn't they have to pay high per-minute rates to call you?
https://mobile.free.fr/fiche-forfait-free
Example from one provider: nope with 100 countries. Including the US, Canada, China etc.
In Finland I see the opposite problem. Traditional calling is dead, so there is absolutely no competition on international calls.
National calls and calls to nordic and Baltic countries are typically included in the subscription. But once you have to call to let's say central Europe per minute rates are exorbitant compared to today's data volume pricing.
Looks expensive. What about the regular phone plans? For instance, the plan I use currently in Japan has high per-minute or per-SMS charges for international numbers. The trade-off, of course, is that it's dirt cheap as long as you don't call international numbers, and basically just use it for mobile data. In a place where everyone uses LINE for communication, this works well.
Inside the EU / EES we usually have minutes included.
Right now my plan, with Orange, costs 7.5 EUR / month with unlimited 5G (for real), 16 GB of data when roaming, unlimited minutes when roaming in EU/EES, and 600 international minutes in EU/EES. We do have great deals here, BTW, I'm sure it's more expensive in other EU countries.
I'd have to upgrade for another 100 minutes with US / Canada, however, I have another plan from Digi that charges per minute but that's dirt cheap.
I do have acquaintances from US with which I communicate primarily via WhatsApp, but I don't need it for my family within EU.
Is this like an American thing? I'm in the Netherlands and i get like 1 spam call per two months (business internet/electricity salesperson usually)
America doesn’t have privacy laws that prevent robot spam. Repercussions for violating the SPAM Act are not prosecuted very often.
Personally, the only “spam” I get is flagged by the cellular provider and 99% of the time the calls are silenced. Not really an issue for me. The only people that “call” me are in my contacts list anyways. Everyone else can leave a VM or text message.
It's also far, far cheaper to make calls to US mobiles than mobiles in any other developed country. Like call termination to an EU mobile is 10x+ than a US mobile.
Definitely. I'm American and I've lived in the Netherlands for the past three years. The difference is night and day.
Whenever I visit, I switch to my US SIM card and am immediately bombarded with spam texts (mostly from political parties) and scam calls. In my experience, Android is pretty good at marking calls and texts as "potential scams," but they're still there. In the Netherlands, I've gotten a few scam attempts via WhatsApp. Other than that, I think I've received one phone call soliciting donations to the Red Cross, and nothing else.
In Spain I get at least 4 or 5 calls a week from different providers.
Luckily at the moment, there's still a delay after you answer the call as (I assume) you're being connected to a human. How long will this last....?
Currently, when I don't hear a voice within 1s or so, I hang up. A legitimate caller will (hopefully) call back pretty quick.
The telephone companies make money based on minutes of usage. There is a very large financial incentive for the really big telcos to allow spam calls.
Spam callers are likely the most lucrative customer of the telephone network for the telephone companies.
I don't see how that could be correct. Once you pay your monthly fee, the fewer minutes you tie up the company's resources the better for them. That's true too for pay-ahead plans.
Your provider get paid by the caller's provider for taking the call, and the marginal costs of a phone call are close to zero.
IMO The problem with data breaches is not the phone number being exposed, it's the other data around it that one can combine with other breaches to make full profiles of a person's comings and goings, their location/purchase history, their associations and preferences, etc.
This is very valuable data to have, not only for advertisers, but also criminals and other bad actors.
Also, the fact that nobody ever questions the authenticity of leaked data should be VERY alarming. Imagine what power someone can hold over someone with manipulated leak data.
Doesn’t even have to be manipulated just incorrect. I share a rather uncommon name with at least two others within five years of my age. I get emails intended for either of them almost daily. One holds political views completely opposite my own. The other is rebuilding his life after a couple years in prison.
I would rather not have my own life intertwined with either of them but undoubtedly it already is to some degree.
Easy trick: Every time you get a spam call, answer it. Talk to them until _they_ hang up. String them along. Put them on speakerphone and keep working. Feed them fake credit card numbers (there are generators out there that create numbers that checksum correctly, so they type them into whatever they're using to bill numbers. Hopefully this helps flag them as a bad actor to the processors, idk).
It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious.
My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good.
Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.
This works.
I started doing this as well.
I mimic the Jolly Roger call service and they usually hang up in less than a minute.
Ex…
- Act like you can’t hear them
- Ask them to restart what they were saying
- Start a conversation with a fictional person in the background
It’s fun and makes getting spam calls enjoyable.
https://jollyrogertelephone.com/
Doctors, dentists, moving companies, home improvement contractors, recruiters, etc. These are some of the most important phone calls I've received in recent memory.
I don't know what world you live in, but I religiously block phone numbers after just one spam call. And I usually don't give out my phone number. (I'm much happier giving out email addresses since I have an infinite supply of addresses.) I never get enough spam calls that I feel like the phone system is going the way of the fax machine.
Agreed. Phone calls are quite common in my circle. Spam calls have definitely risen in the last 10 years, but the ratio is nothing like the GP.
This is why I have my own mail server and domain. Full control over mail, and access to features that you pay for (ie, unlimited e-mail aliases, control over mailbox size). No more worrying about “google decided to shut your free account down for whatever reason. Bye bye decades of emails and loss to services that use email based OTP or magic link login.
Very similar here... same for my primary gmail address... the most annoying thing is the "credit monitoring" that comes with a few of my credit cards is all but worthless... I get constant notices that my "email is compromised" but absolutely no detail on how/where/what exactly is compromised, with is like saying, your email is public.
While I do get a few regular phone calls a week, they're all in my contacts and I don't answer if the number isn't... at least 2/3 the time if I decide to answer as I'm expecting an out of band call, it's spam. On the flip side, I am wanting to setup for "your code is XXXXXX" as a verification on a personal website I'm working on to allow for public users. I know it doesn't add too much, but it's enough to reduce the noise. I'm not even sure what more hoops I need to jump through with Twilio to get to send said messages. I'm not a company, and not sending any kind of marketing campaign.
Yes, and this is the slope that we keep sliding down with these data breaches not being taken seriously. First it was your name and email. Now phone numbers. What's the next bit of our private info that we'll normalize leaking?
I have never shared my phone number with any online service aside from my bank and I don't get any spam on my phone.
I still don't recommend to do that and just toss those that demand your phone number away. Get a business phone if your work demands it.
The phone network we once knew is useless in terms of answering or bothering with any calls or text from those not in your contacts. If you do .. you do so at your own risk!
Really? I get nearly zero spam text maybe 1-2 per year, even voice calls now. I get maybe 1 per month now. I'm with US carrier TMobile and on iOS.
My phone number is from a different area code than I currently live in and I know no one from that area anymore. I can filter out 80% of spam just by ignoring calls from that area.
I wind-up using the phone because so many organizations malevolently misfeature they websites - doing what you want to (pay basic bill or whatever) is hard but upselling and new features, those you can do instantly.
Anyone who has kids has to answer the phone from strangers routinely. School staff and camp counselors are routinely using their own cell phones these days to communicate with parents.
Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.
The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.
In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.
I’ve found some success is curbing spam calls with the “Silence Unknown Callers” feature in iPhone. However this presents a few challenges. Mainly missing calls from delivery agents, who's number is obviously not in my iPhone contacts
Yet another reason the digital world is marching towards a closed-by-default model.
I make and receive regular phone calls all the time. However I only answer those that are from numbers I have in my address book. I do the same with text messages, I have my default view set to "Known Senders" so I'm not even really aware of others. If I'm expecting an unknown sender message, such as a TFA code, it's easy enough to just look in "Unknown Senders" for it.
I’ve been impressed with my iPhone and/or carrier (AT&T in the US) for tagging incoming calls as spam or telemarketing. The phone does still ring but I know not to answer it.
Interesting. Here in the UK I get about 1 spam phone call a year.
The solution to phone spam is voicemail transcription. Every call goes to voicemail, I get the transcription in a minute or two, and can call back if I want to.