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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for this...but can we just ban telemarketing entirely? Why is that even allowed? I've always thought that the law should be written such that telemarketing is legal, but if you engage in it, it is no longer illegal to murder you. You can do it, but you lose your murder protection.

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It’s already illegal to place robocalls to cell phones (under TCPA).

It’s also illegal to robodial any number on the Do Not Call list, but unlike the TCPA, there is a carve out for political campaigning. Thanks, Congress!

Of course, neither does much good when the laws are nearly impossible to enforce. Thanks to caller ID spoofing, it’s usually impossible to tell who actually called you, so good luck collecting damages.

If you really wanted to find out you could just ask the phone company, they know the real number/identity of the person calling you, or at the very least a layer deeper than caller ID. It's not like caller ID spoofing makes you anonymous.

Most robocalls come from VOIP addresses outside the US, which can be created/rotated just like spam email addresses.

Then ban the VOIP providers. Maybe they'll adjust their policies accordingly.

This is essentially how email works, right?

Legitimate companies who deal with mass email on behalf of their clients (such as MailChimp.com) are very careful to prevent abuse, precisely because of the risk of getting blocked (which would sink them, of course).

I'm using Google Voice, 90% of my incoming calls are spam bots. Ban Google?

90% of everybody's incoming calls are spam bots.

This is true for me, but only because nobody calls me except for my wife, and even those calls only happen when she's on break at work and bored. All my other non-work-related communication is over SMS, Facebook Messenger, or Discord.

I've never been robocalled, but I've had "microsoft support" scammers call me once.

I'm in Sweden. Not sure if the difference between 90% and 0% is technological or legislative.

Presumably if the Swedish tax authority called you, they'd speak to you in Swedish, and you'd be suspicious if they couldn't. So if you wanted to run this scam on Swedish targets, you'd need to find a bunch of Swedish speakers willing to work for low wages doing something unethical and illegal. AFAIK, the only country with significant number of Swedish speakers is Sweden, a fairly wealthy country, and also the country where you'd be running the scam, vastly increasing the legal risk.

On the other hand, there are countries which are poor, not the US, and have lots of English speakers, and these scams tend to be run from those countries, at least according to the callers' accents.

I think there are privacy regulations that prevent the phone company from deanonymizing a caller without a warrant. Or at least that’s the excuse I’ve heard cited before.

If you are on the do not call list a warrant SHOULD be easy to get though.

Through what agency? My local police just give you a pamphlet on avoiding phone scams. And nothing that I've seen has come from my diligent reporting to the FCC. I doubt the FBI is going to give me the time of day.

I just don't answer unknown numbers in my phone anymore.

That is why I said should. You would need to be a lawyer to navigate the court system.

For the local police, you have to push them. They are as lazy as anyone else. They also see murder and speeding as more important crimes to focus on - you need to be annoying enough that they help. You may need to walk into court yourself to get the warrant with no police help - something you can do in theory, but in practice I don't know if anyone has ever done it.

I'll give it a shot, I get about five per day.

Good luck. It seems like it should be possible to track these people down, but the effort is high enough that I just can't get the energy to bother.

Several phone carriers have free anti-spam settings you can enable. The one for t-mobile has been pretty solid.

I use T-mobile, but unfortunately have a google voice number. I guess having my calls forwarded from gvoice somehow disables this feature.

As for google voice, I have no idea how many spam calls it's intercepting, but about five a day get through.

I've heard that robocalls are illegal in Germany. It would be difficult to pass a law banning them in the United States because the people writing the laws are themselves heavy users of robocalls as a part of their election campaigns.

In Canada political campaigns will rent from allied political parties in the US their robocall army to escape domestic laws. A favorite trick now is to relentlessly phone at annoying hours and impersonate the rival "Stay on the line for an important message from (insert rival politician)" in hopes they anger you enough to not vote for said rival.

They are illegal in the UK too, but the law doesn't stop calls coming in from abroad or from marketing companies routing through throwaway UK SIP providers.

I'd just like to see phone companies made to have a free option where customers can turn off all calls from unidentifiable/withheld numbers. That would be easy to implement and stop a lot of the problem.

I never answer a call if the number is not saved on my phone. If it's truly important leave a voicemail, I will get back to you if I have to.

I was referring to landlines but yes, on mobile, I agree entirely. The more recent Android dialer correctly identifies spam most times.

We ditched our land line about 10 years ago so I totally forgot about that. Although I remember having one of those phones that had the digital address book on it, maybe you have a different model. Also I have T-Mobile and it tells me when a caller is "likely a scammer" and they even let me outright block those callers.

Yeah I recently permanently set my phone to Do Not Disturb, which blocks all calls from people not in my favorites. It’s been great

Yep pretty much the same here. I just leave it on vibrate. I have been getting more and more spam calls though, I should try DnD.

I think ringtones are distracting and totally unnecessary, with a few exceptions. My phone is either in my pocket, or on my desk nearby to where I'll see it ring.

I don't understand people who leave it on loud at work (or worse, leave it on loud then leave the phone at their desk). It's really inconsiderate. They are probably oblivious though, without someone mentioning it to them.

While you're at it, ban Spam endorsed by the federal government (USPS)... junk mailers even get rebates to fill up your mailbox.

While they are at it, also get rid of the spam car and debt consolidation loan mailers. If you opt-out, you also don't get mailers from AmEx on their newest metallic card, which I might want. But I don't need a loan from some unknown institution at near credit-card rates.

I used to get snail mail almost daily from SoFi trying to get me to refinance my student loans with them. It was really annoying, especially since they wouldn't match my credit union's rates, despite my 810+ credit score.

I wonder how much it cost them to send all those mailers. It was at least one a week for a couple years before I finally went to their website to opt out.

I've wanted to go full Kramer and "unsubscribe" from the USPS. I let my box fill up for weeks and then everything goes into the trash.

I know you're joking, but I (jokingly) considered a law that if you're using your cell phone and are involved in an accident, that accident is your fault and you must pay in excess of actual damages. The problem is of course all the gray areas where there was some emergency, or the unintended side effects of people getting hurt who weren't just being douchebags in traffic.

I had a similar idea where your registration fees are determined by the number of times you honked your horn the previous year.

Make that "how many times someone honked their horn at you" and I'm in.

While we're at it, could we make it illegal for companies to fill my physical mailbox with garbage? Junk mail is a blight on the planet. It's literally just turning trees into garbage with no intermediary step of added value.

politicians at the Federal level excluded themselves from similar rules along with charities. if we can get them to not exclude themselves we might have a chance at blocking everything

It should at least require that a human initiates and terminates every single call.

What does that mean, exactly? Does the human have to whistle the DTMF frequencies into a handset to initiate the call, or can they use a machine that generates those tones when buttons are pressed? Can a machine automatically press the buttons? If so, how is that different from what is allowed today?

> Can a machine automatically press the buttons?

No.

What's hard about this, if a person presses a button that can cause 1 and only one call. You also can't have a machine listen to see if someone picks up then hand off to a person because a human was not listing at the start of the call.

This is probably not the place to nitpick comments for legalese

If I had my way the only legal phone call is one that begins and ends with a one-on-one conversation with a human, preferably one which the receiver has already met

Some big wigs in Hollywood have locked down 99% of our devices so that we can't copy their HD video. I'm pretty sure most of us realize that actually limiting calls to only humans is strictly impossible, but what about getting it to about 99% human with some offenders that we can sue in court.

Fair enough, I could have been more specific. Instead of a dialer calling vast quantities of people and a telemarketer only connecting to the calls that actually go through, the telemarketer should be required to initiate the call (through whatever interface), wait to see if the recipient picks up, and then choose to end the call when they see fit. The point is to allow telemarketing but to keep it a fair and symmetrical affair. One person calling one other person as opposed to me being on the receiving end of hundreds of auto-dialed calls while the telemarketers only have to spend their time with the calls that succeed.

Because calling people is an important GOTV activity. They’re not going to write a law that hurts their ability to campaign.

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