Doing so silently and without a valid and case-specific reason should not be legally allowed.
Edit: Added "street/town" to analogy, and "case-specific" before reason
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/sms-mms-deemed-infor...
I will have to look up how this works in the EU and here in The Netherlands. Something to do for the weekend.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commiss...
I'm glad that Twilio fought for Title II governance: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/60001324418.pdf
Where was everyone else?
As far as the sanctity of the U.S. Mail, it only applies to sealed envelopes/packages, and Congress can ban items from the mail (e.g. lottery pamphlets, spurious tokens, gasoline, etc.)
(Most of my SMS spam comes from .info domains.)
Do you mean that the SMS messages contain links to .info domains?
Basically there are tons of VOIP companies, with varying levels of give-a-shit and spam detection capabilities.
Generally they are incentivized to let people self-serve on their platform - spin up quickly and start running traffic, or blasting spam, whatever. Especially if you're a small company, you're probably more likely to look the other way for a bit if someone is spending money on your platform, until regulators call, and you can be like "ok we looked into it and shut them down". Also you don't want to be overly aggressive, because what if a great customer comes onto your platform, loves the ease of setup, and starts running legitimate traffic, then you shut them down because they were triggered by whatever crappy spam heuristics your small company came up with, and the customer is gone to another platform where they don't have to deal with that.
Then the company/group running the traffic moves onto other VOIP providers until they get a bad enough name or push the envelope so much that no one will take them.
Then they just create a new "company" that no one recognizes the name of, and start again.
Honestly I think an open sourcing of spam detection heuristics and algorithms would be a massive help, but companies that are good at this obviously see it as a competitive advantage, just like the email space - for example if Twilio is great at keeping spam off their platform (no idea if they are, but they would have the most resources to do so), then all numbers registered with Twilio are less likely to get flagged/blocked downstream - all Twilio customers benefit. Twilio can say "any number you buy with us will be considered clean by downstream parties, no need to worry about getting flagged/blocked, then having to change the numbers you use for your business to communicate with customers, which could be saved in their phone already, etc."
The patterns spam takes vary wildly, often being specific to telecom laws and practices in specific jurisdictions, so it really is a tough problem. If an algorithm flags spam, you often want to then reach out to the customer and try to understand if there's a legitimate reason for the traffic patterns, etc. So there's a layer of customer relations beyond the algorithms that's also tough to scale.
But if the sender is a bad actor, they can just keep testing until they succeed, which will make fraud worse.
Are those actually spam messages or messages "detected" as spam.
If I had a spam texts folder that showed me everything I was being blocked from, I'd both appreciate it and not feel this massive breach of trust that things being sent to me are being completely ignored by a third party system.
The system that does this is absolutely primed for censorship, and we have no way to know it's not being used.
1) Neither the SMS protocol nor any phone I've ever seen has any mechanism to file messages in "folders".
2) Processing SMS messages and delivering them to subscribers has a cost. Doing so for high-volume junk messages would place a significant burden on carriers.
3) Most carriers used to charge subscribers for receiving SMS messages. Some still do! Charging subscribers to receive spam SMS messages would be, quite rightly, called out as inappropriate.
Or let me view it through some other means.
I'm not opposed to spam filtration as a user default, but doing so silently without any indication of what is being filtered or ability to verify it is working is not acceptable for such a vital messaging system.
My phone (ROG Phone 3 w/ Android 11) automatically flags spammy texts into a "Spam & Blocked" folder, I assumed this was a stock Android feature - is it not?
Telecom spam filtering seems to be a ridiculously primitive and wide net. I can't imagine a valid use case for dropping a text sent to a number when that number just sent you a text a few seconds before.
I don't understand why SMS spam has such a big issue with false positives compared to email spam when emails are practically free to send but SMS is much more costly.
(Yes, I know there are a lot of false positives on email too ... but we run into false positive SMS spam issues a lot even though it feels like it should be a much simpler problem to solve).
Enable me to be the judge and get out of the way.
Providers should be legally prohibited from intercepting and dropping messages.
It’s a bit obtuse, as you’d expect from the bureaus, but I am thankful for this bit of regulation: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/prescreened-credit-and...
I mean, going back to the postal service - even the weekly pile of "here, throw this away for me." dead trees we receive (in the US) is mildly irritating. Imagine THAT x 1000!
I'm grateful for the silent block in this case. I mean, my social security number is being canceled, I'm about to be arrested by the IRS, the FBI found a suspicious package with my personal information in it and my car warranty (didn't know I had one) is up for renewal. And that's just this morning. What more can I stand? One of these days I'll press 1 out of desperation...
Also I hate govt/big-corp censorship as much as the next person, but none of this seems remotely political or ideological. And consider the alternative.
WE THINK THIS MESSAGE IS SPAM
_tap to read anyway_That's not the issue - the issue is not alerting the sender that the message has failed.
It's not a big deal if the receiver never receives the message - we can find a different way of reaching out or fix the content problem or whatever. But we never find out. As far as the sender is concerned, the message succeeded.
This is a problem and the very bad spam heuristics employed by even the most competent actors (gmail, for instance) mean that anyone can be impacted by this.
The net-neutral solution is for ISPs/telecoms to not spam-block, but rather have spam-blocking be an optional, additional, layer that the consumer can choose at will, or not have at all. But the problem with that solution is that it requires the consumer to do extra work to obtain spam protection, and the consumer would not be protected by default. It also means extra work by all parties delivering spam messages. Unless spam ceases or things otherwise change, I think the clunky solution we currently have is fine for the most part.
Then make it set to "on" by default, and if more than 50% of customers switch it off then change the default.
I also think that this should be a requirement for social media. You should be able to opt out of separate filters for "spam", "misinformation", "breast-feeding", and whatever other reasons a social network has for banning legally protected speech.
USPS has a monopoly on first-class mail in the US and a Congressional mandate to deliver to every address.
Telecoms get a (local) monopoly on parts of the radio spectrum.
USPS has no direct competition for first-class mail and they have a monopoly over your mailbox (if you’re in the US).