Show of hands: if we opened up this feature for you to control this filter for yourself or your loved ones, holding all else constant (price and coverage), would that be sufficient to cause a switch to try out an alternate provider?
I'm not thrilled putting Google in charge of my mobile data, but I still trust Google to safeguard my privacy more than any of the major telcos, and for someone who uses small amounts of data, they're very competitively priced and have really good, simple billing.
But particularly with the Librem Phone coming up, I've been trying to find other phone providers I won't hate that can give me more flexibility in devices and that at least somewhat shares my values. Community Phone looks really interesting. I'm frankly a little bit weirded out that the prices are that low, I'm going over the site trying to figure out what the tradeoffs are.
Rolling out a feature like this would definitely make me more interested in switching. Even if I didn't think it was valuable for me personally, it would make me feel like the company was in close contact with its users and working with them, rather than just blindly selling to them.
From a pure feature point of view, I would still want unknown people to be able to leave me messages. I get legitimate calls from unknown numbers -- but my policy is that if I don't know you and the call isn't important enough to leave a message, you're either spam or I don't care. If it is important enough to leave a message, I screen that and then add the number to my contact list if it's legit.
The real answer is that our prices are low because most of our users to date use less than 1gb per line (nearly all senior citizens on our 15 or 25 plans)... they were overpaying the most while using the least (but even for them we cannot be too low otherwise even the stingiest would think our pricing is too low to be credible... and I am laughed out of /r/nocontract for having prices that are way too high). And since building that volume, we've been able to keep our prices as they are, due to better negotiations with carriers.
That said, most of our customers to date join us just because they like getting a human from Boston or Milwaukee when they answer the phone who can help them quickly, listens intently to what you say, and doesn't require a "tech-ese"
For how long were you with your previous carrier before joining Google Fi and when did you make the switch?
I was with Verizon from my first phone until I first got a smartphone. I switched over to Fi specifically because I didn't want to deal with Verizon's billing, and because I didn't like the company in general.
The low-data approach is really attractive to me -- atm I use less than 500mb a month (sometimes as low as 200-300mb). At that level of usage your prices are very competitive with Fi. My concerns are that I'm starting to migrate away from native services where possible because of the security implications -- more of my texting is happening over Signal rather than SMS, and with the Libre phone theoretically some voice is going to start getting routed over Matrix.
I have no idea what that's going to do to my data usage, I honestly just have to experiment and find out.
Additionally, I'm starting to get more serious about using a VPN everywhere, even on mobile data, since I assume that behind Google, whatever network I'm on is absolutely selling any data that hits their towers. That may drive my data usage up, or it might drive it down because I might feel more comfortable connecting to random wifi networks if I know 100% all of my traffic is going through that VPN.
I'm in an urban area, so this is unrelated to me, but the fact that you're selling dumb phones on your plan is also pretty cool, and I can think of people who would be interested in that if Sprint's rural coverage was better.
Do you operate your own VPN? Or if not, how do you truly evaluate whether you are solving your problem? What questions would you ask post-Librem and post-VPN adoption whose answers would tell you how close you are to solving your problem?
I use a 3rd-party VPN (PIA). This is obviously not perfect privacy, since they could be lying about what data they store. That being said, I'm not trying to hide from a government, I'm trying to hide from advertisers, stalkers, and criminals. So even if I can't personally validate that PIA isn't storing any of my data, having my data accessible to a warrant is still better than having it accessible to hundreds of different sites and companies that I 100% already know I don't trust.
I validate actual implementation security by regularly checking what information shows up in requests when I visit sites. There are a couple of tools that help with that online.
Being strict about what data goes where is part of the reason why my data usage is low. It turns out that if you block network access for most apps on a phone by default, data usage just goes down a lot. Apps like Uber and Lyft make a lot of requests, because they are constantly tracking you, so blocking their network access if you have them installed is just a strict all-around win. Even apps that should be good about this like Google Music will sometimes just randomly decide to download things.
Obviously the librem phone is still kind of up in the air, but my game plan assuming it's not a complete disaster is to migrate over to that and fill in any gaps of functionality by just programming whatever features I need. I dunno how voice calls will work. The idea of switching to something more secure than the existing phone system is attractive, but I mentioned above, I'm not sure what it would do to data usage -- I just don't have any basis to make an educated guess.
In general I want my phone to be a very specialized device -- not a dumb phone, but a phone that only ever does what I tell it to.
So a successful migration for me would look like a company:
- with good coverage
- without any horrible terms like arbitration agreements or stealth charges
- that does not sell data, and that is supportive of low data-usage
- that is at least not actively unethical :)
on a device that:
- gives me root access
- makes calls, texts, and browses the web in a secure way
- that is highly geared towards offline availability and low data-usage
- and that doesn't run extra software or do things behind my back
Librem is my hope for the second part, I guess if it crashes and burns I'll look into custom Android roms. I haven't made a list of carriers yet, but from what you say, it sounds like Community Phone should be high up on that list?
I get ~5 calls/day that are legitimate calls with unknown numbers, and ~10 calls/day that are spam robocalls. I use Google screening and it works reasonably well; I would much prefer to have a telco do the screening automatically.
I use ~10-20GB of data per month, mostly for video calls, mostly for business, mostly via Signal, Slack, Zoom.
Feel free to PM me if you would like more. Contact info is in my user link.
I feel like if I just told some of my relatives about it without it being marketed, they would think I'm the one scamming them.
Sometimes getting them a prepaid phone with limited minutes, like 100/month or 1000/year, manages to fix it because it stops them from answering calls from unrecognized numbers. I guess the logic is they get upset about spending 4 cents a minute.
yes, OMG YES. i get _at least_ 5 spam calls a day. It drives me mad. PLEASE let me whitelist.
I'd still need comparable coverage and pricing, and be able to use my iphone but yes i would switch carriers.
The easy international hookup feature of Google fi I could give up, although that is pretty sweet. All over Europe my phone would hook up automagically with the local system about 30min after my plane landed.
- People in my contact list (or whitelist) automatically get through
- Everyone else is forwarded to a real live human who screens my calls
(The reason why I would pay is I'd rather just have a well-paid human handle this instead of some kind of AI or heuristic.)
The human could be paired with some data, like what phone network the call came from, and additional data about how likely caller ID is spoofed. If you want to get fancy, you could do some kind of machine learning where you tell the person, "this call is xx% likely to be spam."
To keep things simple, I shouldn't be able to set many preferences. (This allows the human to react the same way every time.) But, things like choosing to allow or block "good" robocalls, like automated calls from the power company, are probably useful.
You could try to make a profit by actually asking to get on the do-not-call list, tracking it, and then aggressively suing violators. When I'm interrupted on my cell phone, I just don't have the time to track this kind of thing.
And, one more thing: If you want to get into AI, see if you can figure out how to keep the spammers on the phone as long as possible. This increases their costs dramatically.
Regarding your proposed feature, how much time, or how many calls/fewer distractions, would you look forward to saving every month if this real live human did their job well?
https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/28/using-chatbots-against-v...
I live in Houston, TX. My current carrier is T-mobile. I'm fairly satisfied with cell service where I live, but my parents' home an hour away is garbage. How's your coverage there?
In addition to leaving my devices in do-not-disturb mode, I also specifically disable my voicemail. I am not interested in voicemail messages and have repeatedly asked to have T-mobile permanently disable it for my phones but it keeps turning up anyway. Is Community Phone able to resolve that?
What I would rather have would be if voicemail and other messages could be delivered directly to a personal email address and/or posted to a personal file server. I want to be able to aggregate my phone numbers' correspondence in any standard desktop mail client like Thunderbird.
However, that proposed feature plus the fact you don't sell user data to advertisers (reading your website) is appealing...
I had tried Hiya and Jolly Roger Telephone Co, but neither was good enough to be worth the bugs and loss of privacy.
I had the problem intermittently for years, but it becamw awful (like 6+ spam calls a day) for two weeks before Google apparently fixed it.
At what point did you finally decide to leave your smartphone behind and how severe of a lifestyle change have you had to make in order to operate and function as you have come to expect of yourself?
- We currently offer unlimited talking and texting for $15/month + state taxes and FCC fees, or ~$18.
Interesting service - how did it get started? I see that you're all over the site, assuming youre "Strategy Team James"... Are you the founder of this service?
Who backs the network you talk to?
Would you have a data-only-text-only SIM plan? (i.e. could I have a ~$3/month SIM that ONLY allowed Text? or a $5/month plan that ONLY allowed text+SOME data?
I'd like to put sims in some IoT devices - and want to find the cheapest method to allow this.
I have some other ideas I'd like to talk to you guys about if these sorts of things are something you're open to.
Thanks
We use AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile networks. We also peer with a few hundred regional carriers around the world.
What is your business application and how big of a cost component are these SIM cards and how many of them would you need? Have you checked out hologram.io? They have a card built for this IIRC.
Always open to ideas! I am james@communityphone.org
Ill send you an email though - love the mission you describe for what youre doing.
Maybe you are a fossil, how could I know, but we've figured out how to fashion literal fossils into the black goop that's brought the entire world this far... fossils of all kinds must have a lot of potential!