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Comment by RikNieu | Hacker News Reader

I find TrueCaller very usefull. I used to get sooo many sales and robo-calls a day that I seriously considered just getting rid of my phone. Now they get automatically blocked or I can just put them on a profile that they ring silently and hang up immediately.

I get that this can be dangerous for journalists, but shouldn't they maybe investigate alternative ways of contacting sources privately? Mobile numbers are not in any way secure or anonymous in most parts of the world anyways. Hell, here where I live you have to register with your government ID in order to get your sim card activated.

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If Robocalls are the problem, Truecaller isn't the solution. Regulations against unwanted harassment is. Robocalls are not a force of nature where our only recourse is a technological solution. They are a result of a human choice, where the absolute majority of individual think it's a menace. So our recourse is legal. band-aid solutions like Truecaller cause more problems. The Truecaller product is not a usual commodity where you choose it, and pay a known price. The actual price you pay is totally unknown. Because they require total access to your device without genuine disclosure of their intended use for it.

It also seems to be a problem unique to location. I have never in my life received a robo call in Australia but I did start to get sales calls until I put my number on the do not call list.

At the end of the day, someone somewhere is granting robocallers access to the public telephone network. Hold those service providers legally responsible until they start taking action - it's not like there is no way to find out who they are.

A shell company, operating out of Vanuatu, with VoIP servers in Vietnam and Venezuela? Gl;hf.

International phone calls aren't free and unrestricted. It's quite feasible to arrange a regime where such inbound spam calls are economically unfeasible, and legally unfeasible within a regulatory regime e.g. apply large financial penalties to the originating phone company, of which there's a limited number, all are licensed, and can be prohibited from obtaining new licenses.

At some point those VoIP servers connect to PSTN. Someone is responsible for that.

The non-spammy network operators that interconnect to the spammy network operators make money through that interconnection. If you want them to disconnect their spammy customers, you have to convince them that it's worth it to lose them. This is a manual process and takes time.

This is where infrastructure level legislation comes in. They should be required to provide the full originator information all the way to the people who receive the call, they should block known spammers, they should block other networks that do not do this, and they should be fined heavily if they do not. Otherwise the phone system will become a relic.

In essence, this is the spam debate all over again, with some extra seasoning. (The permissions are incidental - other apps exist that are polite in this respect.) So, out comes the canned spam response:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea.)

(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries (X) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems (X) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

> Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

That's the key difference with phones - phone numbers and call are (quasi-)centrally controlled - by your network provider. A simple legislative solution is just "user gets $10 discount on their phone bill for each spam call" and watch the problem solve itself...

(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

Where does the $10 come from? (Who pays it? Who collects it?) Also, you just invoked a Cobra Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Users collect $10 from their network operator by filling a claim in an online form. Burden of proof on the network operator to prove it wasn't a spam call (e.g. originated from a known number, lasted more than some number of minutes, metadata indicates that it was a two-way conversation, etc.). Huge fines if users complain to the regulator that any of the above isn't true.

Cue the beginning of a spam robo-call (or more accurately, robo-receive) industry purely for the purpose of collecting this $10 for every call received.

This would be difficult to write as a law and very difficult to enforce, though I like the idea of the burden of proof being on the operator.

In India we have a national DND (Do Not Disturb) registry that anyone can signup for and choose whether to receive marketing communications or not, and what categories therein. The regulator has made the operators enforce the reporting mechanism along with penalties (monetary and otherwise) on the marketers for violations. But still, there are cases where a marketer may claim that the person receiving the call/SMS opted for it and signed up or had some transactional relationship with the company.

> Who pays it? Who collects it?

My only guess is that you misunderstand what is being proposed. The spammer is not part of the transaction.

In which case, how in the world will anyone sane consent to "I didn't like this call - prove me wrong or give me $10"? (Yes, yes, make a law, I got that. Good luck getting that passed.)

This thread is not about a voluntary payment, and we don’t typically get to choose which laws we consent to. So I don’t know what you are asking.

Once the law is in effect, that is. First, it needs to be passed - and then, not shot down as unconstitutional. Moving the burden of proof to the operator (a third party! Not even one of the endpoints) sounds...very brave.

This is response is a total straw man argument. I was talking about robo calls, your response is about difficulties with email spam.

The phone network is controlled centrally. Government can force handling spam by phone companies, the same way they can force them to give police call logs etc for the purpose of collecting evidence.

Further more, Robocalls usually are of a more local nature (not international). Government may instruct Police to investigate origins of Robocalls and enforce sanctions. A formal complaint process could be made , where any end user may file a complaint, Providing proof is trivial. Both for the act, and origin (Robocalls are advertising a specific product from a specific company.) A law could be made which mandates a speedy process for filing relevant lawsuites with small claims court, if found guilty the offending party will be levied a large fine.

This is from the top of my head. It probably contains many flaws. But it certainly doesn't seem impossible to combat Robocalls.

As a German I've never received a robo-call in my life. Germany is the 4th largest economy in the world, so it's not like we are just under the radar either. I have no idea what we are doing right, but I am willing to bet it's a legislative solution.

While I agree with your sentiment, in practice, relying on legislative options is not foolproof and is also a band-aid. You require a lot of human cooperation which, to be honest, is not trivial to achieve in 2019. Second, technology frequently outpaces legislative actions. You can relay a spam call/sms around the world and the receiver, her ISP or her government would still be completely unable to fix the issue.

Honestly, I want disposable phone numbers (which are still compatible with public networks) something akin to email aliases. So if one number gets a lot of spam calls, I can just route it to /dev/null.

We need a complete array of legislative + technological solutions.

Can somebody enlighten me why robo-calls are such a problem in the US? I'm completely ignorant of any relevant legislation or enforcement, but as a young German I can literally remember exactly two unsolicited survey calls in my whole life, both on a landline.

This suggests some fundamental difference compared to the US which maybe should be changed instead of a third party band-aid app with lots of problems, but again I don't know this difference and thus will refrain from judging...

Can confirm, being also a (not-that-young-anymore) German. Scam calls or phone marketing is very seldom here. I always assumed this is due to strict laws in Germany.

Another thing is also that most people I know no more publish their telephone number in a (public) phone book, as it used to be still common 30 years ago. That's something where you easily can grab tons of private information from. How common are phone books in the US?

the scammers can't speak german

Phone books are supposedly common in parts of the US but they do not publish cell phone numbers. It's also illegal to telemarket to a cell phone. Of course, nothing is done when phone providers knowingly forward said illegal phone calls to cell phones anyway.

For a somewhat amusing (if roundabout) investigation jumping off point into the robocalls problem: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/awhk76

We get ~10-15 scam calls per day on our landline here in the UK, so it's definitely not a US-only problem.

Mobile numbers are also often the most secure (even if not secure) / only way to contact someone in parts of the world....

True, but for edgecases with no alternative means of contact, there could be other simple solutions. In the articles instance, Chloe could in the future register that sim, and then immediately tag it as Chloe Sullivan on TrueCaller(or whatever app they use in the country in question). Problem solved. Ta-da.

There are solutions other than proposing regulations or limitations on apps that benefit waay more people than it might inconvenience.

I'm not convinced a single fake entery defeats the system here.

The app claims to stop unwanted robo callers...I'm sure those robo callers already have tried your method to look like something else.

Not sure how their system works, but I set my name on TrueCaller and that's how it displays to others. I suppose of all my friends changed my name on their apps to Bozo, it would default to Bozo then. Who knows.

As a user of a different app, I see how many "user reviews" are there for the caller, by the rating (good/neutral/bad). For actual robocallers, the "bad" number is overwhelming, usually with a single "good" review - the spammers would need to flood the review system.

And if there's one thing that spammers are bad at, it's flooding systems with unwanted data...

So you're suggesting that it's a user's responsibility to proactively register their number with every single third party caller ID service that exists and ever will exist? And you consider that a "simple solution"?

It does not seem unreasonable for a service like TrueCaller to notify people that user-generated information about them is being irrevocably added to a globally public repository.

All I'm suggesting is that if a particular user is concerned about their safety, I would suggest they take steps to insure it.

But if one wants to push for regulation to prevent the emergence of apps like TrueCaller, then perhaps we can start regulating robo-calls and sales calls more effectively? Then no one would need to install apps like TrueCaller in the first place.

And I'm suggesting that your proposed solution isn't reasonable, or even discoverable for the majority of people. Clearly this person was concerned about their safety. And clearly they took steps to insure it.

Arguing that the real problem is robo-calls is besides the point. It's like saying if people just drove safer we wouldn't have to have seatbelts. Or if I had bajillions of dollars we wouldn't have to have this discussion, because I'd be off on a beach somewhere. It's marginally related at best.

But if that's the line you really want to take, TrueCaller could have a "That was spam" button, and if enough people click it then it could block the calls. The faux caller ID part doesn't need to be part of the service.

Google Voice offers a somewhat similar service, but it flips the onus around. When enabled the caller has to identify themselves before the call can get through, and then the recipient can screen based on that. This approach is wildly more discoverable for the caller (who the information is attached to), and similarly filters out robo-calls.

> It does not seem unreasonable for a service like TrueCaller to notify people that user-generated information about them is being irrevocably added to a globally public repository.

If they live in Europe, as far as I'm aware, they should actually also need the users consent if the information contains anything like a name (which it most likely does) and a way for users to have their personal data erased permanently.

Maybe there's some exception why they don't need to do this; can someone provide some more info on this?

This data is like Wikipedia.

Does every Wikipedia entry about a person in Europe need that person's permission before it can be published? Can I make Wikipedia delete my Wikipedia page permanently with no way for anyone to ever to recreate it? What about a blog post? If a write about a friend of mine doing something on my blog, do I need my friend's written permission before I can post?

I'm guessing that this answer is "no."

Actually, articles on non-famous people require extra notibility as there are more protections for libel. Helpfully, most people with wikis are famous.

This.

If there's a large enough public interest, then information about a person can be published.

And no, I can't just create a wikipedia page for my neighbor and post their phone number there, that'd be illegal and would get me into serious trouble.

Wikipedia will, and have, remove(d) pages about people who ask them to remove it.

That sounds crazy. You mean if I know some guy named Dave and he lives in Europe, to tell somebody about that I need Dave's permission? Moreover, I should give Dave a way to make me forget his name? I'm pretty sure even in Europe things aren't as bad as this. Though who knows...

uh... you do realize there's a legal difference between telling something to a friend and publishing it to the web, right? They're two completely different things.

> I'm pretty sure even in Europe things aren't as bad as this.

I get your point, but from my (European) perspective, it's the rest of the world where things are bad. I personally do quite enjoy the fact that, in theory at least, everyone is not allowed to simply publish my personal information as they see fit.

> there's a legal difference between telling something to a friend and publishing it to the web, right?

Actually no. Most of things I tell my friends I do by publishing it on the Web (e.g. Facebook, or other social forums).

> I personally do quite enjoy the fact that, in theory at least, everyone is not allowed to simply publish my personal information

You realize what you are aiming at is control over the speech of other people? I.e. you say "since other people call me Dave Whatshisname, now every time anybody utters the sequence of letters 'Dave Whatshisname', I want them to ask permission from me beforehand". This "personal information", taken at this form, is an insane construct - in fact, you are asking to control what other people think and speak in private (if the computer records are extension of memory, which effectively they are) about you. I can't imagine larger violation of privacy than that, and yet it is done in the name of privacy. Doesn't it feel weird?

I'd suspect TrueCaller requires at least a few entries for a phone number before permanently labeling it.

I use "Should I Answer?" for this purpose. I don't have to give them my data in order to know who's calling me most of the time. It could block calls, but I don't use that feature.

It's also worth noting that - as with almost any privacy-violating technology - journalists apparently sometimes use TrueCaller for research themselves.

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