AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown | Hacker News Reader

AT&T, Apple, Google to work on 'robocall' crackdown

reuters.com

33 points0x7fffffff60 comments

I wonder what it is about Google Voice (or my backend T-Mobile number) that results in me rarely getting these? I never get these on my ~10yr old Google Voice number, and my ~2yr old T-Mobile number gets a random call maybe three times a year.

I don't take any special steps against spam calls.. what might i be doing different? I don't get it.

I've been with TMobile since VoiceStream Wireless PCS.

Not a single robot call, ever. Honestly I don't even think I've gotten a telemarketer or salesperson either.

T-Mobile as well here and I have never once received a robocall.

I wonder if they are actively trying to do something to prevent this already and now AT&T wants to join?

I would guess it comes down to the old rules about telemarketers not calling cell phones. If you are in a 'pure' cell phone exchange (the 3 digits after the area code), the number is probably excluded from some dialing lists by inertia.

I get them all the time on my Google Voice line, although that number originated on Cingular and was ported twice before landing on Google. I get about two a day from people mostly asking me to change my home electricity provider and political surveys. I actually shut off incoming voice calls on my main phone number through google voice, because it's at least 75% junk and the 25% I care about will leave a voicemail and I can call them back.

Same here, based on my own experience it might have something to do with how I give my "real" number when I sign up for "real" services and give out gVoice number to strangers, who are less likely to sell my numbers?

I get between 1 and 10 robocalls per day. I finally got fed up, I added my number to donotcall.gov and I am not documenting each call and filing complaints with FCC for each. My wife is getting particularly sinister calls. She was getting calls several times a week telling her to call a number as she was being sued by the IRS. Even though I know this is completely bullshit, actually receiving the call is unnerving and I could see the less savvy phone users as being scared into being fooled. I wonder how some people sleep...

I get the IRS scammer calls a few times a day as well. My co-worker started calling them back and taking them for a ride, after a while they stopped calling him. Maybe scamming the scammers is the way to go :)

It is unnerving. One guy told me that he was going to come to my house and slaughter my family.

I get these too.

They're very threatening, saying that you'll be sued and charged criminally. It's obviously bollocks, but I can see how an elderly or less savvy individual could panic and pay the money.

Personally, I like to reverse troll them. I put on my best impression of my military colleagues neutral tone and say:

"Sir, this a secure line. Any unauthorized use of this system may be a violation of United States Federal law, punishable by up to twenty five years in a detention facility. This call may be recorded and traced for identity verification purposes.

Please provide your 14-digit identity code. If an incorrect code is provided, or no code is entered within three minutes, recovery procedures will be initiated."

It's interesting to see who freezes, who panics, who hangs up, and who doubles down.

I've been on donotcall.gov since 2009, and I was fine up until about six months ago, now it's a handful of nonsense calls per day. What's amazing, is within about thirty seconds of double checking my status on donotcall.gov, I got another robocall from nonsense. Infuriating this can't be policed.

Around iOS 4, I jailbroke my phone and installed an extension that would look up the phone number for every incoming call and tell me what it was. It reliably told me about spam calls without having to answer them.

Jailbreaking wasn't really viable long term, so I lost that. Now I just get the city and state, which isn't very useful. Sometimes I answer and get a spammer, sometimes I don't and let legitimate callers leave a message. It works, but I wish I had the jailbreak extension still.

When Apple said they were adding caller ID extensions in iOS 10 I got excited about being able to rebuild the feature. Unfortunately, all they can do is provide a list of number/name mappings, they can't do dynamic lookups when a call comes in. Useless! So I'm a little unimpressed with Apple here, since there's such a great solution they're blocking.

Verizon just launched mobile caller ID. Now I can just hit block every time CASH PROMOTIONS is calling.

(Unfortunately it costs an extra $3/month or something...)

I just want to send all non-contact calls to voicemail, and defer those notifications until the end of the day. The idea that anyone can immediately demand synchronous communication from anyone else is really weird.

> The idea that anyone can immediately demand synchronous communication from anyone else is really weird.

I think that a more apt description is that anyone can request synchronous communication, which doesn't sound so weird to me.

Devices don't really have the ui to treat attempted contacts as requests though. For example, gp doesn't seem to have found a way to do what they describe.

Phone calls cover my iPhone with a full-screen modal and make it completely flip out for 20 seconds, buzzing or making noise. It's very demanding and distracting, I wouldn't mind it as much if they appeared just like any other app.

There was a rich set of features around this in Grand Central that Google removed when it became Google Voice. There were options for having people not in your contact list have to go through a phone tree (that you could customize) before being allowed to make your phone ring.

Grand Central getting bought by Google was the worst thing that could have happened to it. So sad to see an amazing service nerfed.

There is no Hiya for iOS?

iOS doesn't provide the necessary hooks for something like that. I checked out that app, and it does exist on iOS, but apparently it works by creating a "spam caller" contact and adding a shitload of numbers to it. Not quite what I'd like.

I was hoping that we had programmatic access to vibrations in the Contacts framework so that I could make an app to set an override vibration for all of my contacts, then set my default to no vibration, but we don't.

I hardly use my phone anymore. More than half of the calls I receive are robocalls.

I'd get rid of phone service if I could still call 911.

You can! The FCC requires wireless providers to transmit all 911 calls, including those from phones with no service.

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/911-wireless-services

I wonder if it would be possible to somehow "tunnel" external calls through this.

One would think they should have means to prevent that considering they can restrict access to call forwarding?

Awesome! I've already "cut the cord". Soon I might "snip the SIM".

lol, I like this, "snip the sim".

If you pull your SIM and then turn on the phone, you should get a message saying it can only be used in emergencies. If I pull my SIMM, it scrolls "No SIM Inserted | Emergency calls only" across the top of the lock screen.

you can call 911 even without a sim card

You can still call 911.

Take your SIM card out and give it a shot (kidding, don't...).

Sadly, in my case, it's closer to 90-95%.

The new rule is if I don't know who it is via caller ID (by having an existing contact show), I immediately decline the call. If they leave no voicemail, that's it. If they leave a voicemail, I listen. 95% of those are the robocaller messages, in which then the number is added to a robocaller contact that is blocked -- and now contains close to 300 phone numbers.

most people i know just let their voicemail box fill up so nobody can leave new messages. i think it's a technology on its last legs, unless someone can save it with a great new UI.

anyone who knows you will text you.

Do people never call you, or do you really receive that many robocalls? Is your number listed publicly anywhere? I have an AT&T cell and a Google Voice number and I get maybe 1 spam call per month on my cell and 0 on my Google Voice. Might be worth changing your phone number.

The problem with this approach is that Caller ID is a lie, so they have an infinite supply of phone numbers to use.

Source: received several calls from 123-456-7890.

Quickly checking I don't find a definitive source, but I am under the impression that a cell phone with no service plan can still call 911 (as long as a tower is in range).

You can also look at cheaper cell phone plans. Some of the prepaid ones are ~$40 a year if you don't care about using it much. You could just turn off the ringer.

The title is oddly limiting, to one cell carrier and two OS developers. The list is as follows, and includes ALL national mobile carriers, several ISPs, most OS developers, many major hardware developers.

It's continually annoying that headlines focus on Google and Apple to the detriment of everyone else. I recall recent studies done by large groups of researchers that included a couple Googlers, and was then headlined as "Google publishes..."

AT&T, Apple, ATIS, Bandwidth, Blackberry,

British Telecom, CenturyLink, Charter, Cincinnati Bell, Comcast,

Consumers Union, Cox, Ericsson, FairPoint, Frontier,

Google, Inteliquent, Level 3, LG, Microsoft,

Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Silver Star, Sirius XM,

Sprint, Syniverse, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon

West, Windstream, and X5 Solutions

My Windows 10 Mobile device blissfully has a "Block caller" button. I've been using it religiously for the last three weeks in particular. I won't mind if someone finally starts gutting these numbers at the source.

I've been contributing my block list to 800notes.com, where every number I've ever gotten robocalls from is already so marked. I feel like it should be easy for companies to take this sort of information which is openly contributed by users to these web databases, and start cutting off the providers who dole out these phone numbers.

It doesn't matter if the callers are from overseas, because the numbers are issued by US telecoms.

That used to work for me. Recently, however, I've been getting the calls from different numbers every time. The new pattern seems to be to grab a number for a few days, use it, dump, and repeat. Looking at the 800notes for the last several I've received, all of the comments are less than a few days older than the call I received.

Yeah, I agree, the rotation rate seems very high right now, and they're mostly the same robocallers. This just means, to me, it should be very easy for telecoms to suss out who is buying these numbers, and through what telecom.

When I receive these calls, I set my phone down and go about my business, letting the robot play itself out. I figure every CPU cycle wasted on me spares someone else.

Finally. Been waiting for anti-spam tech to be applied to incoming phone calls.

Seems harder to do in practice than email. Can't scan content of messages. Harder to have end users involved in the training.

I don't understand why reliable caller id isn't possible, especially now that so many calls are VOIP from end-to-end.

I wish there was some type of TLS for phone calls and I could set my phone to never ring unless the caller can be authenticated.

As soon as someone doesn't acknowledge my name when I pick up the phone, I hang up on them, since I figure only a robot would ignore such basic etiquette. Thankfully, I don't get robocalled that often.

Now, hooking a telemarketer up to a robot (http://jollyrogertelephone.com/about/) on the other hand, I have yet to do.

Android, iOS can build a "Report Spam/RoboCall" Button in the "Answer Screen" that will report the number to a local / central database.

It auto black list the number in local database.

In the cental database, when that number reach N reported (N / day, week), Android, iOS can grey/black list them and warning the user about the number before user receive the call.

That works fine, until the robocallers get another batch of phone numbers to tie to their VoIP systems and the blocked ones roll back in to general use.

I already get robocalls that are targeted to my own area code and region, and the same calls from multiple numbers. Cycling through those won't like add too much burden to the robot unless there's a heavy price to pay for a new batch of numbers.

The FTC ran a contest at Defcon last year to fight robocalls:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/contests/robocalls-humanity-...

is anyone going to tell me this violates the first amendment?

Commercial speech has less protection than other speech.

But not none, if legislation is needed it will probably mirror the CAN SPAM Act which be an improvement but probably doesn't go far enough for the HN crowd.

I think this is a valid question--not sure why people want to bury this post, because I'm interested to hear this out.

I think it's the same argument and laws that apply against emails. Some say that it's equally "first amendment" to block emails and phone calls. (IANAL) [0]

[0] http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/spam

Based on the type of companies participating with FCC (e.g. Google and Apple), my guess is that the technology will be a blacklist/whitelist "trust/reputation" database similar to web certificates. With such a database in place, smartphones like iPhone/Android will have updated software that can optionally screen the call's caller-id reputation. (Analogous to a web browser url bar have a "padlock" or blocking https pages from loading at all with bad certificates.)

(If the above implementation is accurate, it means blocking robocalls will be feasible on smartphones but not legacy analog land line phones.)

It wouldn't be a First Amendment issue because the owners of the phones can opt into blocking robotelemarketing callers. Same concept as AdBlock or putting "127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net" in your HOSTS.

If modifying your HOSTS file or adding a email routing rule is GMail/MSOutlook to redirect mail to a trash folder is violating someone elses First Amendment rights, it's not an argument I've ever seen presented.

Note that "Google and Apple" aren't representative of the types of companies here, the media just obsesses about them. There are 33 companies in all. Mostly telecoms.

The "Robocall Strike Force" also includes smartphone manufacturers such as Ericsson, LG, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung so it would be misleading to think it's just 2 Silicon Valley technology companies and 31 telecoms.

From the article, it looks like intelligence about VOIP is part of the potential solution.

https://www.wirelessweek.com/news/2016/08/us-carriers-join-a...

That's the argument I was making above--that being able to block emails and phone numbers is just as expressive as making phone calls and emails. Same thing with hosts file and ad blocking; people are guaranteed the right to privacy and not having to listen to other's speech is also freedom of speech. Just because you can make such speech doesn't mean I have to listen or read such speech.

Why would you have a first amendment right to dial my private phone line?

Not all speech is protected. Also in this case they aren't really stopping any specific speech but rather a method that is widely regarded as harassment

The TCPA already forbids robocalls to mobile numbers without prior express written consent[1]. This is merely about enforcement. First amendment arguments would be a bit late to the game at this stage.

I actually saved a bunch of my junk calls and went looking for a lawyer. Those things are worth up to $1500 a piece so I was hoping to make some fast money. I was unable to find a lawyer who even knew what I was talking about. Referrals are welcome, thanks.

[1]https://www.wsgr.com/publications/PDFSearch/wsgralert-prior-...

It actually may, and this is something being debated in the courts.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/07/28/judge-first-amendment-pr...

If Google and Apple were only participating to throw their around their weight as lobbyists to pass a new law -- similar to what Arkansas legislature tried to do, it might be a First Amendment debate.

However, a key sentence from the article was:

"concrete plans to accelerate the development and adoption of new tools and solutions,"

The "new tools" doesn't sound like crafting a law for a court to strike down but new technology to empower users to block the nuisance calls.

The constitution isn't a suicide pact. It's not a magic spell, either.

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