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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. FWIW, the article is talking about assigning each user a fraud score for iTunes purchases. I'm guessing it's so that people can't use new iTunes accounts to game apps, or to use in-app purchases to test stolen credit cards.

Having said that, Apple should definitely be more aggressive about blocking spam numbers. My perception is that it does absolutely nothing about them. Does Android do a better job here?

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I worked for a company that scanned credit card transactions for fraudulent behavior and it was remarkable how reliable the correlation between stolen credit cards and iTunes purchases were. Identity thieves almost always tried to spend $0.99 as a test purchase and then hundreds or thousands of dollars of iTunes gift cards. Apple probably doesn't want to rely on the credit card companies to catch this if they can do it themselves.

I've been pretty happy with the way Android is handling spammers. Not only it shows when a call is suspected to be spam, it also gives me the opportunity to flag a caller as such.

How is this configured? I've never seen an incoming call shown as possible spam.

In fact, when I tell Google Voice a number is spam, while it won't forward calls from that number anymore, it still forwards both calls and texts to Hangouts. The only way to prevent Hangouts from receiving known spam is to block the number, which is buried in the app. (I hate Hangouts, it has to be the best self-torture app ever.)

Edit: As I was typing this, I received notification on both my phone (Hangouts) and in my web browser (Hangouts) of a voicemail from a number previously marked as spam. "Our system is showing your local Google listing is currently not managed or has not been properly cleaned and verified ..." In Google Voice, this voicemail is in the Spam folder. And yet I received two notifications on my devices for it.

There is a setting on the Phone app just for Caller ID and Spam and you even have the ability to filter spam calls. I don't have Google Voice so I don't know if/how it works.

Apple should definitely be more aggressive about blocking spam numbers.

Apple does some work in this area. I know that occasionally I will get calls on my iPhones that have a line underneath reading "Possible spam" or something similar. But I think it's more of a carrier issue than a device manufacturer issue.

IIRC, there was a mention in one of the previous keynotes about spam prediction being available in China. I don't know if that's the same tech or not, but that's the only time I can remember Apple mentioning it.

Android does a much better job at this, and it baffles me why Apple doesn't. I get 5-10 spam calls every day on my iPhone, many of them early in the morning (I used to live on the east coast and am now on the west coast).

On my wife's phone, most spam calls are auto detected as "Spam Likely" and you can report new numbers as spam, which I presume Google uses to update its database of spam callers.

The android phone app warns about suspected spam callers, and project fi has a spam filtering feature that has worked pretty well for me.

I suspect US regulations make it very hard to block incoming calls. I think it has to do with not blocking calls coming from another phone network.

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