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Comment by carlospwk | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what a robocall is but I would LOVE a simple notification banner for when someone calls. I rarely get calls these days but when I do, it’s a major annoyance if I’m doing something on my phone. It’s time calls are relegated to the same level of urgency as WhatsApp messages and emails.

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I just gotta say it's funny that receiving a phone call on your phone is a major annoyance these days.

I know what you mean but it wasn't funny when I was recording my kid at his first birthday party and got interrupted by a robocall just seconds before he cut the cake. From that day, I've learned to put the phone on DND mode before recording anything memorable.

What I don’t understand is why Apple isn’t fixing this.

It’s simple - it’s broken UI, Android has done it, people want it, it doesn’t help in any way, so why keep it? I mean why? Hell, if you really want to keep it, give an option to disable it.

Add this to the list of reasons why advertising is a cancer on society. Without robocalls and telemarketers, calls wouldn't be an annoyance.

(Though I agree that they should be relegated to the level of notifications now. Smartphones are computers. Imagine if Skype call would lock you out of whatever you're doing on your desktop.)

To me it’s more like a device which can also make calls with an app.

Number 1 reason why I still jailbreak.

do you iive outside the U.S.?

I like in the UK and get maybe 5 robocalls a year. I'm not at all cautious about giving out my phone number and I've had the same number for at least 10 years.

Why is this such a problem in America but not elsewhere?

I'm not an expert, but I would guess that regulation around these kinds of `nuisance` calls is tighter outside the U.S. We (in the U.S.) have a National Do Not Call Registry[0] but I don't know how strong the enforcement of violations is. With scammers, I think much of the problem is that they're using VoIP and other technologies that make it difficult to pin down exactly who is making the calls, and from where.

[0] https://www.donotcall.gov

i am guessing that robocalls go after specific demographics. so people in more popular groups get more calls than others

I think there is less intelligence in the system than that. I get a lot of robocalls in Spanish, a language I do not know. (and other than living in California, there's not a lot about me that would suggest I know Spanish?) I mean, it is a small portion of my robocalls, but it's still several a week, when I answer unknown numbers.

But, I get a lot of robocalls; 3 calls a day is light. So clearly, some people get more calls than others, I'm just saying, I don't think the filtering criteria is particularly smart.

that, or the source data is not very good. maybe you got a phone number used by a person of spanish origin before.

that's sort of what I was getting at? I mean, I think that we have the same problem we have with spam; it's so cheap to send it that it doesn't really matter that only a tiny fraction of those who receive the spam might actually be credible targets; but it's so cheap that it doesn't really matter.

It's not. Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount. Like most things in the social media era, the grievances of a very vocal minority appear to be a larger group than they actually are.

For example, the title of the article tells us that robocalls are "killing us".

> Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount.

And you never get Robocalls?

Between my cell and landline, I get 5 to 10 "robocalls" a day. Recently I started getting them in the wee hours of the morning. They outnumber legitimate calls about 30:1. Very many show up with a Caller ID with a spoofed local area-code and prefix.

I noticed a big uptick when I was dumb enough to buy a domain without paying the privacy fee.

I live it the US, had my number for 10+ years and actually have not gotten a Robocall once.

And I have shared my number in a lot of places

I’m in Finland. I get about 2-3 telemarketing calls a month which I quickly end and add the number as a spam contact.

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