Nah. We're talking about spam texts and phone calls. That stuff isn't legal.
Yeah what everyone else does is creepy af, and _should be illegal_, but that's not the facts on the ground today.
Yeah what everyone else does is creepy af, and _should be illegal_, but that's not the facts on the ground today.
These guys are just doing what the ad guys are doing but it’s for fraud.
The fraud is only half of it.
Those cracks need to be sealed, but there's enough creepy af industry lobbying that it won't happen because money.
There's money in them thar retirement villages.
Google's panopticon started this desperate grab for personal contact information (see recent discussions here on HN around Smart TVs as another one of the outgrowths of this) in it's ability to turn it into advertising profit on a previously unprecedented scale.
This is separate to telecomms companies seeming lack of ability to control or monitor what's on their networks. Which is also a regulation / enforcement problem. However, there are functions that are 'allowed' on telecomms networks to facilitate 'business' (eg. overseas companies being able to spoof local numbers so that people actually answer their calls), such that this 'feature' is then exploited by scammers - when, arguably, the whole 'feature' is a scam in the first place.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-03/mobiles-and-landlines...
(I'm sure I read an article somewhere that described the ability to spoof local numbers as a business decision to allow overseas marketers to sell their wares locally without fear of their calls not being answered. Trying to find it. I may be mistaken.)
Edit: services such as virtual phone numbers, such as these:
https://callhippo.com/blog/country/virtual-phone-number-prov...
https://www.numeroesim.com/how-to-get-an-australian-phone-nu...
https://virtual-local-numbers.com/countries/65-australia.htm...
This is likely coming from the purely 'if it can be abused it shouldn't exist' bias, which may mean I've taken a step closer to becoming an old luddite, but it feels as if, if this is possible, then the entire infrastructure can't be trusted any more - and people consciously choosing to just not answer their phones for any unrecognised number feels like confirmation of this stance.