Federal judges have struck down an anti-robocall rule | Hacker News Reader

Federal judges have struck down an anti-robocall rule

arstechnica.com

50 pointsjoeyespo34 comments

Maybe the rule had good intentions, but I agree with the court's ruling. The rule, as written, is far too broad.

"The FCC's 2015 decision said that a device meets the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) definition of an "autodialer" if it can be modified to make robocalls, even if the smartphone user hasn't actually downloaded an autodialing app.

That interpretation treats all smartphones as autodialers because any smartphone has the capability of downloading an autodialing app, judges ruled. Since any call made by an autodialer could violate anti-robocall rules, this led to a troubling conclusion: judges said that an unwanted call from a smartphone could violate anti-robocall rules even if the smartphone user hasn't downloaded an autodialing app.

Imagine, for instance, that a person wishes to send an invitation for a social gathering to a person she recently met for the first time. If she lacks prior express consent to send the invitation, and if she obtains the acquaintance's cell phone number from a mutual friend, she ostensibly commits a violation of federal law by calling or sending a text message from her smartphone to extend the invitation. And if she sends a group message inviting 10 people to the gathering, again without securing prior express consent from any of the recipients, she not only would have infringed the TCPA 10 distinct times but would also face a minimum damages recovery against her of $5,000."

>Imagine, for instance, that a person wishes to send an invitation for a social gathering to a person she recently met for the first time. If she lacks prior express consent to send the invitation, and if she obtains the acquaintance's cell phone number from a mutual friend, she ostensibly commits a violation of federal law by calling or sending a text message from her smartphone to extend the invitation. And if she sends a group message inviting 10 people to the gathering, again without securing prior express consent from any of the recipients, she not only would have infringed the TCPA 10 distinct times but would also face a minimum damages recovery against her of $5,000."

Who wants to receive calls from a friend of a friend to invite them to a party? Why not ask the friend to invite their friend if you want them to come? This does sound like spammy behavior to me, yet these laws are clearly unsuitable.

Maybe people should have an option to be paid some small amount for each call from a number not on their whitelist that they accept. It would also have the interesting consequence of creating a market for wasting the spammers time.

It's perfectly acceptable in social situations to get a number of friend from a friend to send them a text message or a phone call.

>"It's perfectly acceptable in social situations to get a number of friend from a friend to send them a text message or a phone call."

Sure, and I have done this many times. But if we append "to invite them to their party" to your statement it becomes "kind of weird". If we also add that they are doing this to many people at once, it becomes "even more strange".

“Weird” should be enforced socially and not by making it a crime enforced by the government.

If a friend of a friend texts you weirdly, tell your friend to tell them to knock it off. Getting the government involved is totally disproportionate.

I agree, which I why I wrote: "these laws are clearly unsuitable"

For me personally, robocalls outnumber legit call calls 10:1 these days.

Interestingly, most robocalls I get come from numbers that match the first 6 digits of my own phone number. I don't know why they do that, but it makes it easier to screen calls.

100% of phone calls to my mobile device are robo calls. I get around 5 per day and (because of this) I never answer the phone. I actually tried to uninstall the dialer app but it seems to be fairly well-integrated into Android.

The humans in my life call via voip(ish) apps (Messenger and Facetime mostly).

Part of my monthly cell service cost is ostensibly for the line. Which I don't use and would prefer not to have all.

Aaah the beauty of "pay per airtime" fleecing by US phone companies

Meanwhile phone spammers pay 10x less for international minutes

I think very few non-prepaid mobile plans have metered airtime for donestic calls anymore.

True, but it doesn't matter, because it's not the caller paying the extra fee to call a mobile, you are.

The pricing structure incentives robocalls

They do that because it makes it harder for me to screen calls, I have kids at schools where landlines will have the same first 6 digits, if I get a call like that, I assume that it's a garbage call but I have to answer it in case I need to pick up a child or go to the doctor.

Add a contact in your address book with the school’s number(s)? Sure there is still a small chance of collision with the spammers’ fake numbers, but it should help.

My mobile gets an average of 3 robocalls a day, so I’m 100% whitelist at this point. If the caller’s number is not in my address book it gets ignored.

That requires you to actually know the number they'll be calling from though.

Also, assumes that it's not a local teacher calling from a cell phone.

I tell my kids that if they are calling me from someone else's phone or a school office phone I probably won't answer but they should be sure to leave a voicemail because I will listen to that.

They spoof Caller-ID to give an illusion of being local. They are generally out of area, calling from VOIP "boiler rooms".

I believe the assumption is that if the number is (apparently) on the same exchange as yours, it might be your neighbour, kid, etc. and you'd be more likely to pick up. Since most of those originate from a VOIP box in some low cost country, they do not necessarily know that this is unlikely to work in reality.

Me too. Car warranty calls, "Free Vacation/Hotel Scams", and a bunch of calls in Spanish.

I was in the same boat, so I started just leaving my phone silenced all of the time. I almost never get robocalls anymore. Interestingly, it seems like whenever I turn my ringer on because I'm expecting a call I get a robocall. It's probably just coincidence though.

In practice, I am getting more and more robocalls nowadays on my cell phone, about one every couple days. I wish my phone had the ability to only pick up when it was a human-dialed call.

I've had amazing success with the "Should I answer?" App.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mistergrou...

>The database is built-up by the community of all users who have the application installed and/or visiting the application pages. The users can anonymously send ratings and reviews for public phone numbers (we do not collect info for private numbers) based on real answered calls. These ratings are stored in central server database where our admins can check them and after evaluation and approval the reviews with ranking are then distributed to all mobile phones with our application installed.

Can I download this database?

I get robocalls every single day. The problem is telecom companies don't care because even if we all turned off phone calls, we're still paying them for mobile internet.

I've turned on call-rejection for all calls for a year now, and it's been fine. More people should do this.

I'm having trouble understanding what the motivation for such a rule could have been in the first place. Certainly cellphones can't be the origin of enough genuine robocalls for this to have been necessary to curb them.

Maybe they represented a small percentage of calls compared to traditional mass-callers, but smartphones gives everybody the capability of using software to automate phone activity.

I'm annoyed that origin spoofing (i.e., falsified caller ID) is not blocked by the telecoms. It seems like it would be easy enough to do if mandated by Congress. And for incoming calls from foreign networks, at the least they could identify it as a non-US number.

Because there are legitimate uses for caller ID spoofing

The only legitimate use is setting it to another number that you own. It would be relatively easy for telecoms to allow this but block all other falsification of caller ID.

Does anyone understand the implications of the revocation of the "one-call safe harbor"?

Does this mean that if I switch numbers and I get a bunch of spam for the previous owner of that number, I have to go and opt-out all over again?

We’re quickly approaching a place where I’m ready to send all voice calls not in contacts to /dev/null. Not even voicemail, but to the ether. If a company wants to get ahold of me, they can send me an email or a text message.

last two days I've gotten unsolicited sms messages, in batches of 5. one set from a woman supposedly looking for a good time, and the other political spam.

i don't see any reason why sms isn't going to end up the same trash heap that email (try running a server without a filter) and voice have become

I’ll bet money that Ajit won’t do anything to curb VoIP robocallers. They are scamming money out of American consumers so that’s kind of a bummer.

Time to download that Robocall app and call the FCC about why this was a dumb idea.

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