FCC rules AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal
fcc.gov
fcc.gov
If the entity calling gives an explanation I care about, then I can press a button and the bot says "thanks, connecting you now" and then I can say "hello" with my own voice and have a normal conversation. I think most people think it's just a fancy answering machine, they don't realize I'm controlling it.
Voice calls are on the decline anyway, but I think it's becoming possible to have a very sophisticated AI secretary answer calls for you, even beyond what I've explained Google is doing. Imagine being able to give your LLM phone secretary a prompt and it would answer calls for you. You could tell it something like "the snowblower I listed in the classifieds is already sold" and maybe it could automatically resolve some calls or text messages for you.
In fairness, it may be awkward, but it doesn't waste the caller's time, none of the robot messages are long, and people are quickly able to say their name and why they're calling.
I've never had the experience you've had where they start to leave a message. Maybe because I don't live in The Bay? Idk. They either just hang up or go to voicemail. Which always results in the game of phone tag. So not only was mission __not__ accomplished, but the mission difficulty increased.
Working as intended!
This isn't a new process, answering machines and operators have been around for ages. If your information is important, leave a message. If you're unwilling to leave a message, text. If you're unwilling to leave a message or text, it wasn't important.
Maybe it's regional, I'm in the Bay Area, and people are used to it here by now.
I was actually wondering this too. Bay Area is a bubble of its own. I wouldn't be surprised if people were just more used to tech in general.
FWIW, I'm betting it is just a fancy answering machine for most people. I use this feature (couldn't live without it), but I've never once been in-the-loop. My phone acts autonomously! I checked the logs for a few months, but I don't even bother anymore. It's never had a false positive.
thanks spammers. and thanks FCC for sitting idly over the decades and letting the spammers ruin it. weird time to finally put your foot down, but sure, okay.
Edit: And perhaps it's assuming your k is a kh and that you want суха instead of suka.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_minced_oaths
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Minced_oaths_by_lang...
And in the Russian section... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/блин#Russian
blyat means prostitute
sukhoy means dry
blin means pancake and is used as a similar sounding replacement for blyat (eg. say blin instead of blyat when something goes wrong)
I can't reproduce your results on google translate but I noticed odd translations which don't make any sense at times. I guess it comes from crowdsourcing results and people purposefully providing wrong translations for comedic effect.
Or wait, is it блядь?
- What did they mean?
- Was it an insult?
- Why "dry"?
(thinks some more)
- This is the lamest insult ever!
It really doesn't translate properly, but I'd say "fucking shit" is more in spirit than "fucking bitch". It's not an insult targeting someone directly, more of a sign of frustration.
Although you're not alone, most of the time when I call customer support and it's an overseas call center, I have to say Hello 2-3 times before the person on the other end acknowledges my existence. I guess they don't realize that I can hear all of their background noise before they talk.
And don't normal people end up saying something like "hello?? Anyone there?" in that case anyway?
In the very rare event that somebody calls somebody else for leisure (who doesn’t text yet? Really.) I guess the caller should initiate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplink_(video_game)
"I am the systems administrator. My voice is my passport. Verify me."
(Which is itself a callback to the 1992 movie Sneakers.)
In this case you may be right.
You're not paranoid, banks, the Minnesota Attorney General and the FCC have been warning about scammers recording even as simple as a "yes" to use in their scams [1][2][3], although actual evidence has been scarce to say the least [4].
[1] https://www.membersalliance.org/_/kcms-doc/816/34363/Can-You...
[2] https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/Publications/CanYouHearM...
[3] https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-warns-can-you-hear-me-phone...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_You_Hear_Me%3F_(telephone_...
Search results point for this number as being related to PV panels scam.
its definitely whats happening, you're not crazy
It is possible they just hung up because I was already a little skeptical and feeling cagey, so didn’t give an enthusiastic “yeah that’s me.”
Anyway, I’ve never been called for something that benefits me. So, hopefully every company that depends on cold-calling will go out of business soon as everyone younger than, like, halfway through gen X doesn’t pick up their phone anymore.
https://medium.com/@Gentlemen_ESWAR/your-phone-is-listening-...
The calls are just one of the early gates, as someone screening your call is likely not to fall for the eventual scam.
The gates don’t have to be clever for this to work. There merely has to be enough people that you are going to find that 0.1% who will fall for it.
I've been doing this for a little over a decade and it hasn't let me down yet.
Everytime I buy something from an eshop I have to start taking calls around the delivery date.
Also it would be a bit annoying (and risky!) to have to remember to turn it on and off again any time I order food.
You can also set up a shortcut to toggle the setting. There’s been a couple times when waiting for a callback where I turn the setting off. Then when I get the call I switch it back.
Ultimately, for me, the pros far outweigh the cons. But you have to make the decision for yourself.
The timing was essential, though.
That way, everyone who should contact you can do so and if someone else gets their hand on your contact info you can figure out who leaked it.
This way, I can easily filter incoming email, and I can see where an email came from if any party sells my data.
This also works with GMail by the way, you can use youraccount+anyrandomstring@gmail.com and emails will still be delivered to you.
I use a separate email handle that I only hand out to actual human beings, never to companies and never use for account registrations.
This has worked really well for the past 15 years or so.
A weakness with the GMail process is that spammers are able to remove the + part (even if most don't), and your credentials or identity can be aligned across leaked credential databases by removing the + part.
On the stripping of the + and suffix, yeah, bad actors who recognize your scheme can do that, but spamming is about quantity, not quality, so they just aren't going to put in the effort.
(I still have some email handling rules for my domain that understand the - aliases I created.)
I think that both conventions are flawed, as adversaries that know the convention can just remove the distinguishing part. If someone signs up with the email address real+spam@example.com, then they're just going to spam real@example.com. Apple's thing where it creates a987dfc429be@icloud.com is much better. Maybe that's the username I selected. Maybe it's an anti-spam forwarding address. There is no way of knowing. (Actually, I think it does something like relay.icloud.com? So yeah, they know it's not your real address. Apple just says "if you reject this, you can't have an iPhone app", which is what makes it work.)
(Personally I use a dedicated catch-all domain now, and the username is the distinguishing part – try to remove that!)
[0]: https://cock.li/, they do have SFW domains though
Unfortunately, this is only for email no such thing for phones or anything.
Still trivial to detect. Random letter/number combinations, letter combinations that don't exist in the dictionary, no dictionary word? Pretty detectable.
By equal token, you can't be sure that the email address doesn't actually just contain a plus sign.
I was disappointed to find out at work recently that the plus convention was not configured. It made testing account signups more difficult. This is when I dug in a bit and found it that it depends in the mail server for whether those are unique addresses or not.
I never worry about sites that require signups any more, I just autogenerate an email for them and use a fake name. I couldn’t give a shit less if they get hacked or leak data, because the email and password are randomly generated. If they turn out to spam me I just disable that email address and never hear from them again.
The only people who have my “real” email addresses are people I know personally.
That's not remotely true.
The very very very vast majority of actual iCloud email addresses are going to have "dictionary" names. It's quite trivial to detect a randomized address (and at that point, you probably don't even care about a couple of false positives).
Multiple instances of letter-number-letter-number ("b2y4r")? Coupled with letter combinations that don't exist in most languages ("ytbn")? And no dictionary words ("john", "smith", "booklover")? Random address.
Now, whether you care to do business with someone who detects this is a different question altogether.
But they are absolutely distinguishable.
Same with Private Relay: here's one of mine (with one character changed) - 2he5rs923s@privaterelay.appleid.com
I just looked at my alias list in iCloud and every single “hide my email” alias looks like a plausible @icloud.com address with dictionary words, and every “sign in with Apple” address is using the privaterelay address with the super random characters. There are no addresses that look like a987dfc429be@icloud.com.
I faced that with Costco support. My method is custom email on personal domain name. Had to setup email alias in gmail to do so. Was a pain.
> The universe isn't naturally shaped in a way that makes interrupting difficult, and never has been.
Yes it is... physical space is shaped to keep most people from being able to interrupt you. Being able to call anyone around the world changed that.
- I had my own room as a kid. My parents and brother banged on the door whenever they pleased.
- I worked at a tech company, had my own desk, and wore headphones. Coworkers still sent me Slack messages and tapped me on my shoulder.
- I've lived in a home in the burbs. People came to my home and rang the bell.
None of them were hard for the interruptor to do, and all of them happened frequently. In fact, I would argue that they are more frequent than the number of phone calls I get nowadays, which are actually easy much easier to screen/ignore than any of the above interruptions.
I would say depending on how bad someone has it they could get 1 to 3 spam calls a day, I assume if someone was getting consistently more than that they'd use a screener to lower it. That's a significant amount.
I'm not here defending spam calls. They are annoying AF.
Nor do I disagree that hypothetically more people on Earth have access to us than ever before. Of course they do.
Nor do I find being interrupted pleasant. I personally find it very annoying, even when it's a loved one.
I'm just making the point that this idea of world where people weren't easy to interrupt never existed.
I am not saying people couldn’t interrupt before, there are simply more ways for more people to interrupt you than ever before.
I'm trying to change this, however, and make a lot more local friends. Despite the higher potential for being interrupted.
1 is north america's calling code.
- The user could type in a N digit number and hit a button...
- This would cause another user's device to instantly stop doing what it was doing. ring and buzz with a modal popup window...
- With no authentication whatsoever or often even no identification...
- And then if that other user pushed a button, it allowed the initial user to be able to instantly start sending them voice
This thing would never make it past any app store's guidelines, and would likely be unacceptable to users. It's intrusive, invasive, and practically invites abuse and spam. Yet, since The Phone is an actual historic invention that goes back decades, it's culturally acceptable for I guess legacy reasons.
So.. add a few digits and suddenly spammers would have trouble.
On the hand, add a few digits to phone numbers and Y2K might look like a walk in the park.
Part of the usefulness is that you can write and receive to addresses without prior permission.
I've had wonderful conversations with authors, academics, politicians and other strangers around the world thanks to the permissive ability of email.
If the number isn’t in my contacts, it goes to voicemail.
I used to answer calls from local numbers, but I’ve started getting spam calls with my local area code now.
They have my email address, they send me txts all the time, but apparently collections is still making phone calls. Had to be the dumbest thing I'd seen. Once I answered and found out the issue, I paid the bill properly, but I wonder how far it would have gone before they cut off my power, while they kept sending me emails and txts about things that have nothing to do with my bill.
I mean: I think it is perfectly OK to have a policy that requires real people to make real phone calls for some things -- especially things that might not fit into automated systems.
But I think it's very bizarre that these real people would not also leave a voicemail message stating the purpose of the call.
(There's tons of reasons for people to not answer the phone that extend beyond screening unknown numbers.
Like: I might be happy to answer the phone for a strange number but I'm crawling around under my car and my hands are covered in greasy road funk. Or I'm with a client. Or I'm at work and my boss is an overbearing prick. Or...)
If you live in an area of low crime, though, maybe it'll be fine not to answer phone calls from numbers that aren't in your phone.
Biggest reason - voicemail. Most numbers have a mailbox limit, it's somewhat common to reach a number that has a full mailbox. Sure, you should be emptying your mailbox, but this still means you can easily drop calls if you haven't checked it in a while.
Even in the highest crime areas the ratio of spam calls to legit and urgent calls is going to be thousands to one. You can cumulatively save a lot of time and annoyance by not answering all of those spam calls. I'm actually surprised to see this debated, I also stopped answering unknown numbers years ago and thought that was standard at this point.
All other calls are routed to voice-mail and near-instantly transcribed. The message then shows up on my desktop and on my mobile phone. I can read it and respond to it as necessary.
Who knows what damage has been done to the clutch, or the engine internals while it was bouncing off the rev limiter for minutes at a time. Also I'll bet there is a lot less rubber on the tires than before, and probably all kinds of nasty stuff on the inside.
Heck no I'm not taking it back. That's insurance all day long.
I call back from an unlisted number. Few people have my actual phone #.
----
If people are persistant, I usually mention something to the effect of "you don't want my phone number in your device, I know some weird people."
----
The first time I used Venmo, was also my last — the "feature" which show you every person who has your phone number in their phonebook was a bit too weird [the idea of public payments also strange].
This kind of problem needs to be solved at the root cause, say if the phone companies could be made to pay a bit when you get spammed and forced to recover their costs from the spammers the issue would be solved, now if they profit the issue will get larger and alrger.
Couldn't be too difficult to set up a "unknown number" redirect that prompts for a pin, then forwards to a live line if correct.
I have missed deliveries or other important things due to my policy.
I now just pick up and say "hello?" and count off two seconds. If I don't hear a response within that time I hang up. I've had a couple false positives, but they generally just assume there was a dropped call and try again.
Yes, I use common sense and DO pick up calls from unknown numbers when I am expecting them. Most days, I am not expecting them.
*bonus if they're speaking heavily accented english and miss important connecting words, suggesting they don't even really understand the script they're reading from, much less the job description they just pulled off of Indeed or wherever.
Really what's needed it ditching numbers, at least as user facing things, and having something like phone-over-dns.
The only issue is that a friend once listed me as their emergency contact for a gym membership, but then the gym made telemarketing calls to me with it. There should be federal law protecting emergency contact numbers from being shared or used for any reason except an emergency.
Alternative method might be to set up a Twilio workflow that says "Press 1 to reach me" and only forward to your actual phone after that. That will probably eliminate all the robocallers but not the human telemarketers
If it’s important, the caller will generally start leaving a message, and you can pick up right there
I can't think of any non-action-movie scenarios where me picking up the phone within a specific 120 second window would be a life-or-death situation. If there are any, they are so unlikely that they are not even remotely worth being annoyed by multiple scam calls a day.
The problem is that if I'm getting repeated calls from an unrecognized number, I'm assuming my wife, my kids, or my parents are in an ambulance, so I have to drop everything and answer.
As a rule of thumb, if I get a one-off call that doesn't leave a message, I'll search my email inbox for that number, as they've probably contacted me separately. However, one time, I got called 5 times in 90 minutes, with the only message being 23 seconds of silence, and an email I hadn't even read yet (searching the number brought up the email). I sent an angry email that amounted to "you have told me how you AND YOUR CLIENTS treat prospective employees' time. I will never apply to any job you suggest, even independently of you. Stop calling"
It's let me down a ton. Deliveries, contractors, maintenance people, doctor's offices with a last minute appointment available, and so forth. Fortunately never for a true emergency, but that's also something to keep in mind as well.
There are lots of things that people simply don't leave a voice mail or text because if they can't contact you immediately, there's no point. Or if the contractor can't get you on the phone, they'll just move onto the next home and skip work on yours that day or that whole week.
So it's not win/win. It's very much win/lose.
Probably a wash whatever you do after picking up.
I'm in that situation, and it works most but not all of the time.
I don't really keep track, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten robocalls with an area code appropriate to my city, either it was coincidence or they were using a database that had my actual location.
It won’t always work, e.g. the request won’t reach the delivery driver who’s a contractor of the subcontractor of the logistics company you mention this to. However, I’ve found it works with businesses that are small enough to care about customer satisfaction.
People that listen to that will... send a text.
It is sad that virtually every form of communication: snail mail, phone, email is overridden with spam and fraud, and the "FCC" does jack about it except a CYA "hey we said it was wrong".
The FCC has been so thoroughly lost to regulatory capture and licentious industry - lobbying - official revolving door that it possibly the least effective federal regulatory agency, and that is saying something
Same with restaurants calling about a reservation opening up. Etc.
Not to mention the fact that if someone doesn't intend to leave a voicemail, they'll often/usually hang up as soon as the prerecorded message starts. "Hi, you've reached" -- <click>.
For the rest, unless its an appointment that requires me picking up the phone ASAP (which is maybe once or twice a year for me), they leave a message and I just call back.
In France, we have a gouv service to block non-solicited phone commercial calls. It works pretty well. Combined with the default google spam blocker, most of the phone calls I receive are phone calls I want.
I had an iPhone for a few months and the spam was so bad, even with the third party spam blockers. I switched back to Android shortly after.
Maybe if I just placed a delivery order I will answer for an unknown local number. Beyond that, leave a message at the beep and maybe I'll check it in a few days.
Humans will typically ask if anyone is there, robots will either start their pre-recorded bullshit or hang up.
Um what? Why? It's just as much a sample of your voice, and if it's what you usually say on the phone then a recording of it will... sound like it's you on the phone.
As I said, I don't really know what I'm talking about, that was just my rationale.
I've been screening all my calls with the pixel call screener feature. Worth it.
It… seems to work?
Unfortunately, rulings such as this FCC's are ineffective to prevent it. If someone is already committing fraud, they obviously won't care if it's illegal to use an AI-generated voice.
That said, I don't answer suspicious numbers and I won't move past "hello" until the caller identifies themselves.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-likely-to-d...
Maybe the thing that guards against tyranny is that Congress can override them (by passing a law) if regulators screw up badly enough?
At least, in theory.
Just like, in theory, the people could elect a better Congress.
Congress can't even handle managing fiscal policy sanely, and that's the one job they can't delegate.
If every little thing now becomes an open question of law, we exist in a vacuum of power where courts arbitrarily decide all sorts of things, giving massive amounts of power to the government.
Uncertainty breeds timidness. In order for people to have freedom to act, they need to know in advance what is legal and what is not.
> a committee of leading experts from the private sector and the advocacy side of any given subject matter weigh in yearly on any topic before regulations can be changed
This is part of the design of regulatory agencies. Rulings like this come after an extensive process of consultation and public comment.
They could bundle these up regularly.
To be very specific: For each new chemical discovered or manuf'd, environmental protection laws would need to be amended by parliament. It is madness to think about.
Wishing the Congress had to study and pass legislation for all enforcement and regulation of society is tantamount to accelerationism.
We are a divided house.
> Republicans on Wednesday blocked an emergency spending bill to fund the war in Ukraine, demanding strict new border restrictions in exchange and severely jeopardizing President Biden’s push to replenish the war chests of American allies before the end of the year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/politics/senate-ukrain...
The Democrats said okay. Senators Sinema, Lankford (literally the 2nd most conservative senator according to his own congressional page), and Murphy spent the last couple months negotiating a new bill.
Trump then tanked it saying it would help Biden:
> Republican front-runner Donald Trump said he wants to be held responsible for blocking a bipartisan border security bill in the works in the Senate as President Biden seeks emergency authority to rein in a record surge of unauthorized border crossings.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/27/trump-bor...
Now the GOP house refuses to bring the bill to the floor:
> House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson declared it "dead on arrival" if it reaches his chamber.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/04/1226427234/senate-border-deal...
We were a divided government when McConnell was Senate majority leader and Pelosi was House majority leader and still able to pass legislation.
What we have now is a House run by clowns.
See also the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform debacle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Security,_Economic_Oppo...
It would be literally impossible for congress to rule on every nuanced thing that Chevron allows agencies to do. Saying "congress should take care of it" shows either an intentional disregard for the roles agencies and their experts play, or a complete misunderstanding of the power it grants to federal agencies.
"It breeds tyranny" is absolutely ridiculous. When agencies rule in a manner people find unjust, they sue and win or lose in a court of law based on the content of the policy. It also gives congress a chance to rule on "big ticket" things that do need addressing without causing an absolute standstill having to rule on something as mundane as what the legal weight and length limit should be each season for catching a salmon from federal land in Montana.
We have departments that have traditionally been staffed with SMEs to make these rulings and decisions on behalf of congress, who legislates their existence and budget.
In other words, why would an agency be more persuadable than congress?
The alternative is requiring Congress to write every single rule explicitly and pass a law adapting to any change in circumstance or technology. In practice this means "no regulation" because Congress is pretty slow and adding more detail would only make them slower.
If and when agencies overstep that gets resolved through legal challenges.
Of course government is incompetent and can't be reasonable in regulation? Is that the idea? How dare these corporations not be given minutely detailed regulations that they can easily tear apart to pollute to their convenience? You mean you want REASON in government and regulation?
>Do you think this is an unreasonable interpretation? Or should Congress be required to list exactly what technologies are prohibited in this context and update that list every time something new comes around?
Not OP but this is the right question to ask. My answer is yes, congress is quite literally required to update statute to reflect modern technology (ensuring it conforms to the founding principles of course).
> The Commission shall prescribe regulations to implement the requirements of this subsection. In implementing the requirements of this subsection, the Commission — (A) shall consider prescribing regulations to allow businesses to avoid receiving calls made using an artificial or prerecorded voice to which they have not given their prior express consent; […]
Who do you think determines whether or not a particular voice is an 'artificial' voice? The FCC or the Courts? If it's the former, that's Chevron deference. You haven't quoted any legislation which expressly confers power on the FCC to interpret the law (which is typically the province of courts) and determine themselves whether or not a particular 'voice' is an 'artificial' ... 'voice'. But the legislation, at least arguably, impliedly confers that power per Chevron - like in Chevron, it was within the EPA's power to determine what a "source" of pollution was.
Compare Australia, where Chevron deference was rejected as forming part of Australian administrative law (Enfield v Development Assessment Commission (2000) 199 CLR 135), it would be a question for the courts whether the agency was authorised to make this regulation, without deferring to the agency's interpretation. The agency does it's best to conform with the law, but it's ultimately the courts that say what the law is.
Ending the ability of federal agencies to write useful regulations means unregulated spam robocalls! It's the dream of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Rich people are unbounded. They would say we don't need regulations about food safety written by those ninnys in the federal government.
In short, good. How many here can even map the entire list of all the agencies and corresponding rules, recommendations, and guidance that has the weight of law.
<< It will cause chaos and disaster if congress has to make regulations for every little thing.
Free people pull in all sorts of directions. Its going to be ok.
We (unfortunately) need credit now. And we (unfortunately) cannot depend on congress to do anything.
Prior courts said that they were going to use Chevron deference when interpreting the laws that congress passed, since it keeps them simpler, and allows the executive branch to apply common sense (while retaining safeguards in case agencies overstep their bounds).
The current court has repeatedly decided to arbitrarily reinterpret settled portions of the law by overturning existing rulings. Getting rid of chevron deference would be a continuation of that, though on a scale that probably exceeds the fraction of the US legal code the court has actually read.
The current courts' actions are unprecedented in the US. The Supreme Court is not supposed to overturn prior Supreme Court rulings, except in exceptional circumstances. They even went so far as to mostly overturn the 4th amendment when they eliminated the right to privacy as part of the Roe v. Wade ruling.
At this point they're looking more like an unchecked legislative branch than a judicial body. This is the reason they are wildly unpopular. They understand this, and they've explicitly said they don't plan to follow the wishes of the electorate. On top of that they've done a lot to undermine US election integrity with recent rulings.
However, given ongoing demographic shifts, there's a good chance they'll have to cope with a unified executive and legislative branch. At that point, expect court packing or impeachments. The only other path I see is some sort of apartheid-style setup designed to ignore the votes of anyone that's urban, educated, female, minority, or not elderly.
- SCOTUS, in a judgement not yet issued or rendered (and thus currently wholly imagined by me).- Strict textualist judge that really loves his new RV.
> Here are some potential counterfactual arguments that the Chevron doctrine does not allow the FCC from regulating AI robocalls:
- The Communications Act of 1934, which gives the FCC authority to regulate communications by wire and radio, does not explicitly grant the FCC authority to regulate AI technology. Since AI was not envisioned at the time the Act was passed, one could argue that Congress did not intend to delegate regulatory authority over AI to the FCC. Therefore, the FCC's regulation of AI robocalls would fail the first step of the Chevron test as not being in accordance with clear congressional intent.
- Even if one argues that the FCC's authority to regulate "communications by wire and radio" could be broadly interpreted to include AI communications technologies, the FCC's specific regulation of AI robocalls could still be seen as an unreasonable interpretation of the Act under the second step of Chevron. Given the lack of explicit mention of AI in the Act, a court may find that the FCC's assertion of authority to regulate AI robocalls through additional restrictions beyond what applies to standard robocalls is an unreasonable stretch of its delegated authority.
- The nature of AI technologies is such that they raise novel issues that were not contemplated at the time of the Communications Act. Heavy-handed regulation of emerging AI technologies by the FCC without clear congressional authorization could stifle innovation. Under these circumstances, one could argue that deference to the FCC's interpretation of its authority is unwarranted.
- Kagi FastGPT
(If you look at the original Chevron decision, they were much more interested in trying to get out of the “understand and make determinations about complex environmental issues” business anyway, more so than the “understand the law” business.)
Postscript: For your next unfairly downvoted reply I recommend that you explain to someone Citizens United was actually a nonprofit trying to air a movie on cable television and was fighting the FEC over it. (Total hackjob of an organization, mind you. But core political speech.) Some facts are unpopular.
On one hand, fair. On the other hand, you can only coast along on the old post-cold war bi-partisan consensus for so long without getting new consensus before institutions lose their legitimacy (you can already see this happening a bit).
We can default back to the last time we had consensus for some things, for some time, but you do need to get it again before big changes happen. If you get to the point where the last time we had consensus is before the majority of the people in the system were alive, you either need to hard pivot your society to focus on ancestor worship, or you need to focus on something you do have consensus on.
This puts the courts in a difficult situation. The answer is often “congress needs to fix this”, but that can’t actually happen.
It's something that US political system allowed to fester for decades, arguably since 70s.
Take the entire situation around abortions. Supreme Court determined that there is a right, based in protection of privacy, that prohibits states from banning abortion before certain date. Congress didn't have to make a law about it, or even add amendment to constitution. So they didn't have to explain anything to their constituents. "It's the court! I can't do anything!" everybody was happy.
Except not. People who opposed it, saw it as undemocratic. Taking controversial issue out of the hands of representatives forever. So they pushed against it, and attempted to circumvent the ruling. Mostly they failed. But they never gave up, and their movement never died down. In fact it only became more and more powerful. And when they finally had favorable judges on the court they finally had their way.
Angering their opponents, who were now using similar "this isn't democratic" arguments. In the end, nobody really won. The only certain result is that people on both sides of political spectrum now have reasons to distrust Supreme Court.
Compare that to the situation in Europe. Lawmakers took their time, but eventually they arrived at set of laws that most of society agrees with, or at very least is able to tolerate.
TLDR: The existing system led to the congress being incapable of making laws. If america is to survive, courts can't keep saving congress from controversial laws.
Management has to be allowed to delegate. Those saying Congress should not be allowed to do so are really just saying they want the government abolished.
The problem is that this device was nothing more than a drawing on a business card sized piece of steel. It amounts to an egregious first amendment violation at the very least.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/federal-jury-convicts-t...
There's nothing earnest or in good faith here, and you can't reasonably make me believe otherwise. The person was trying to skirt the law and got caught.
Or let me put it another way: if this keycard isn't a big deal, why do gun owners care?
This is an objective fact.
> The person was trying to skirt the law and got caught.
What law? The law that says you can't distribute a chart of a lightning link? That's not a real law. The point here is that the ATF created the law out of whole cloth.
> Or let me put it another way: if this keycard isn't a big deal, why do gun owners care?
Are you serious? The guy is going to jail under the charge that he distributed a machine gun, for distributing legal information in a country that has freedom of speech as the first amendment. He didn't even violate ITAR. I have a shirt with the CNC instructions to create a lightning link printed on it. Should I go to prison too?
"First they came for the $some_group..."
Guess what I and almost everyone else doesn’t do: that.
Machine guns aren't evil because they're regulated.
In 1944 hundreds of thousands of liberator pistols were air dropped to the French resistance to fight Axis occupation.
In Myanmar today, 3d printed FGC-9 rifles are being used by rebels to resist a coup staged by the military.
In Ukraine, as I'm sure you're already aware, weaponry donated by NATO and the United States is being used in combination with improvised munitions delivered by drone to resist a large scale genocidal invasion by Russia.
Weapons are tools, no more good or evil than the person wielding the tool. Freedom of information destabilizes monopolies on violence and empowers people to communicate, organize, and defend themselves from aggressors.
> The ATF examined the Auto Key Cards and a firearms enforcement officer was able to remove the pieces of a lightning link from an Auto Key Card using a common Dremel rotary tool in about 40 minutes.
So in effect, the ATF was able to manufacture an unregistered machine gun conversion device from a legal piece of steel with a drawing on it, using tools. Steel is not illegal, nor are drawings. As mentioned by rpmisms, we have a first amendment right to freedom of speech in the United States.
The same thing can be accomplished, arguably more easily, by bending a metal coat hanger into the required shape, but Target isn't being raided by the ATF.
The globalists don't want you to know this, but you can print guns at home. I printed dozens of guns.
Everything I've read about this says it will result in mass deregulation of industries that must be regulated. (Koch Industries for example) In practical terms, in our current world, not in some libertarian-inspired fantasy that doesn't exist today.
There are definitely areas where Chevron deference can "hurt" us--for example political tampering at agencies.. but overall I think we should rely on experts to do the regulating and try to fix the existing system.
On top of that what happened to judicial precedent? Only good when it suits our ends I guess.
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2024/1/10/24025127/supreme-court-...
If the courts decide to get rid of that, they're intentionally misinterpreting the laws that congress has passed over that time. They're also effectively rewriting a large fraction of US law, despite the fact that the constitution is carefully designed to prevent such a small group of (unelected or elected) people from modifying US law that quickly, and without safe guards.
The current Supreme Court has repeatedly undermined separation of powers, and they're explicitly doing so against the wishes of the electorate. Their behavior is fundamentally undemocratic.
Correct, because in the United States, our model of government is a Democratic Republic, not a democracy. For all of the flaws of our system of law, the Constitution is considered supreme, and any laws that violate the Constitution are to be considered null and void. The job of the Supreme Court is to decide the Constitutionality of laws.
One interpretation of removing Chevron deference is that it's defacto rewriting law, another is that executive agencies have been doing this for decades already. The truth is probably some mix of the two.
A plain and non-ideological reading of what you typed is that this is a contradiction at best and saying the SCOTUS supersedes the constitution at worst.
Agencies are often wrong and sometimes very seriously so. The FDA trying to take over regulation of tests is another example.
There is a perfectly legitimate view that Chevron deference is - at least in some circumstances - not indefeasible.
But the paradox is that is part of the constitution too. There are several creatures of the constitution that supersede the constitution. Treaties can.
If it were such that individual states with greater agency could negatively impact neighbouring states and in Chevrons original case, environment and agriculture, then it’s a dangerous precedent of opening up states to competitive market at the detriment greater societal impact and responsibilities. Both positive and negative but the incentives are there to push towards later in pursuit of fast profits and deferred responsibilities.
Am I making sense? States can compete for corporate interests, while we know full well who runs the senate: lobbyists with deep pockets.
It is literally the job of Congress to update laws. That they are bad at doing that is not relevant to the place of the Court in the structure of this country's government.
>If the courts decide to get rid of that, they're intentionally misinterpreting the laws that congress has passed over that time.
The opposite of this is true. If the Court decides to jettison Chevron deference (you should look in to why that case is called "Chevron") it means that gasp our legislators have to actually listen to constituents and write laws and not just bet that the executive branch in the next election cycle agrees with them.
Overturning Chevron means federal courts no longer have to give deference to agency experts. Unelected judges will have free rein to impose their own views in these cases.
Nothing about Chevron will force Congress to write more precise laws.
People are not interchangeable: if you take a financial regulatory expert from SEC and move them to FDA and ask them to regulate drug adjuvants, you're not going to get great results. Dropping Chevron would put judges in the position of being experts in all the fields where Congress requires regulation.
Besides, this works in other countries, in the Czech Republic for instance, I'm pretty sure I've seen lawsuits against regulatory agencies here.
Really simple example: Congress passes a law that requires the FAA to regulate the safety of commercial aviation, but doesn't explicitly say "all panels must be bolted to the fuselage".
FAA decides any removable panel must be positively attached to the fuselage using castle nuts and pins or an equivalent design.
Boeing thinks that rule is wrong (overbearing, overreach, poorly conceived, whatever).
Under Chevron, the judge hears both sides, and defers to the FAA on the issue of safety. The law wasn't explicit about design of door panel fasteners, but was clear the FAA should regulate the industry.
Without Chevron, there is no deference to the experts at the FAA. The judge is free to impose their own worldview on the case.
Note that with Chevron in place, the judge can still determine the FAA overreached its authority (like if they decided to regulate car transport on the way to the airport). The judge just can't ignore the presumed expertise of the executive branch in applying details to Congressionally mandated regulation.
Without Chevron, we trade executive expertise for the whims of an unelected judge. While bureaucrats are unelected, they are still beholden to Congress for both funding and legislation allowing their existence in the first place. The President can't simply conjure regulators out of thin air.
Our current Chevron regime works here under our existing set of laws and structures.
Genuinely curious as to why people think this. This is the standard talking point you see about this issue, and it's just not true. Getting rid of Chevron doesn't mean that judges need to become experts in all minutia of a particular field. It means the executive can't liberally interpret statute to their heart's desire. Maybe you mean that you expect more cases to come to the courts if Chevron is dropped, but cases on complex technical matters already come to the courts all the time in all fields. Are you concerned that the volume of cases goes up or something?
As opposed to unelected bureaucrats who serve at the whim of the executive branch and are often political appointees? Do you not remember the meltdown this site had over Trump's FCC commissioner and his views on net neutrality?
If an executive agency steps out of line, Congress can defund it or pass other legislation clarifying their intent.
No such mechanism exists with the federal bench (other than impeachment).
All Chevron does is impose a restriction on the federal courts when deciding cases brought against the executive branch. It doesn't give bureaucrats free rein to do what they want.
So, an agency says you broke the law.
You take the agency to court.
The court defers to the agency.
You’ve been denied your day in court.
The agency: we have determined that this action by company X is against our policies.
The courts: Congress said that the agency decides the policy. Even if we think an action is inside policy, the agency has Congressional authority to change the policy to put the contested action firmly outside policy.
The company should therefore lobby Congress to regulate the agency. Maybe you could make a case about retroactive or post-facto laws, but I suspect the company is not usually claiming that they abide by the letter of the policy, but that the policy is outside the agency's powers.
In this case, considering AI-generated voices "artificial" for the purposes of applying a law seems obvious enough to me that I don't think the Chevron doctrine would apply, personally.
Yes and it's in cases where a law gives authority and expectations to an agency. In the past, it was left up to experienced and qualified agency specialists to work out how best to implement it because 1) it's their job and 2) because Congress knows it can't write every possible contingency into a law.
Chevron supports this. The SCotUS case is brought by folks who want to shift that determination from agency specialists to judges who don't have the related experience or qualifications. It would effectively allow endless monkey wrenches to be thrown into the oversight process by corporations who aren't keen on oversight.
All correct until this bit. They in fact want to shift it back to congress, who should do a better job in specifying what power they delegate to unelected heads of executive branch agencies.
That is one potential, down-the-road outcome of non-qualified judges being inserted into the process. Stalling oversight is the outcome that dominates all of it tho.
> congress, who should do a better job in specifying what power they delegate to unelected heads of executive branch agencies.
A law with every possible contingency can not be written. It's why Congress signals the desired outcomes the language of the law and expects qualified agency employees to bring those outcomes to fruition.
When Congress does that and there is a dispute, it ultimately falls to judges to adjudicate until Congress can update the law.
> The idea behind such deference is that expert agencies, accountable to an elected president, are better suited than federal judges to make the policy choices that Congress left open.
>At the time of the 1984 Chevron v. NRDC ruling, Doniger notes, it was widely perceived in legal and political circles that judges in the lower federal courts were inappropriately crafting policy by deciding for themselves what certain laws meant, effectively substituting their own ideas for the discernment of agency experts. “So the Supreme Court was basically saying to the lower courts: Stop inserting your own policy preferences under the guise of interpreting the law,” Doniger says.
> Now the Supreme Court could reopen the door for federal judges to decide how executive-branch agencies should go about their daily business whenever Congress has used ambiguous language
This court has been very consistent about that and we’re going to have it until the 2050s so get with the program
I'm not sure where you see how Chevron skips those components. Congress gives authority to an agency and indicates what it wants done. Chevron says the agency (using qualified agency specialists) are who Congress intends to work out the many, many details that are impossible to write into effective law.
That's not entirely accurate. The doctrine only applies to ambiguous statutes and it's really that an agency has the authority to decide what Congress meant when it wrote them. The question is whether an agency can interpret what Congress intends for it to do, or if that should be left to Congress for clarification.
You make it sound like Chevron is the underpinning for execution of all statutory authority, and it isn't. It's an edge-case doctrine.
Again, that's still not my reading of it. The determination is still done by the agency, right? This is purely about the recourse of folks who don't like what the agency has decided and the futility of appealing it or not.
I feel like both you here and the original poster I replied to are implicitly saying that an agency only truly has the ability to implement laws based on expert qualifications if there's no "check" on them. But this isn't really true for Congress, is it? They make laws around specific topics based on expert input all the time, whether it be around trade or cryptography or whatever, while still having the courts sit above them with the ability to hear out someone who thinks the law is unconstitutional. How is this any different?
It's true that without Chevron, there's more freedom to appeal an agency's decisions. But as a general principle (i.e. not this specific moment in time but say 20 years from now), it seems just as likely to me that an agency is politicized, paid for by corporate donors, etc, as the courts, so it's not clear to me that an un-appealable agency decision is better than one that can be appealed.
Edge cases make great news, but I suspect in our sprawling administrative framework of government agencies, the vast, vast majority of interpretation of laws is done by experts, is relatively fair, and has gone and will continue to go unchallenged. So I don't think the characterization that "interpretation of laws by agencies will move to judges from experts" is fair, on the whole. Maybe only on the controversial parts where there are interests on all sides, but then maybe that's a fair place to have that, too.
With enough evidence, operators are compelled to provide data and are given an opportunity to correct their action. If they refuse, FCC will eventually issue an order to all other providers to not accept calls from the bad actor.
Is this a humorous reference? Or is this supposed to be notable for some reason?
I'm not convinced that STIR/SHAKEN even works properly. Recently, I migrated a DID from one VOIP provider to another. I set the outbound caller ID on the new provider, and it was showing up Verified with a checkmark to mobile devices before I had even submitted the port request to the old provider.
As long as they managed to attach the identity header to the sip invite correctly, and are not considered to be a shady actor - downstream providers such as carriers probably have no reason to label it as spam. Spam labeling is typically done via analytics, outsourced to third parties like First Orion.
Attest levels are not in themselves proper tools for spam detection. The real meat of stir shaken is the origid in the identity JWT claim which is an opaque identifier that can be traced back to a particular user/customer/network equipment.
STIR/SHAKEN being sold as the one and only solution for spam calls was a mistake as it is only one iteration in the right direction. You have a handful of RFCs and ATIS specs that the FCC told operators to implement in a phased approach, and ultimately some gaps were uncovered in practice that reduced its effectiveness.
IDK, my iPhone will show me the live transcription of the callers message without me answering it. And then if I want to speak to them, I can answer the call in the middle of the message being left and talk to them.
Sounds cool, but this concept isn't at all new. Anyone who used answering machines did exactly this. You would listen to the message being left in real-time and pick up if you actually wanted to talk to them.
If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.
Not professional, not an option for some calls.
> If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.
It's actually my problem if I miss an important call. A message is great, sure, but I still missed the call.
If I see that it's an important call, then I can pick up and answer right there mid-voicemail.
That's what I was referring to. They start talking when they leave the voicemail.
This is how we did it for a long time with home answering machines too. Except instead of reading a live transcription, you listened to their live recording, and could interrupt it and answer if you wanted to talk to them. It's not a new idea.
And not everybody has a phone that'll do this live message transcribing.
And no, everybody who decides to not leave a message isn't "not worth your time" or something.
Callers can't (well, shouldn't) expect to be able to reach you immediately by calling you. There's a lot of valid reasons to not answer your phone. You might be driving, you might be in the bathroom, you might be getting lunch in a noisy place, you might be in the middle of a different important conversation, etc.
At which point the caller needs to realize that the "professional" thing to do is leave a message if they want to be called back. (Or try calling again later.) Because there's enough junk calls that expecting people to call back every missed call that didn't leave a message is just unreasonable.
That's easy to say when you're not looking for a new job. Or don't run a business.
You live in a tiny bubble if you honestly believe that.
"Eight-in-ten Americans say they don’t generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/12/14/most-amer...
And that study is from 3 years ago, it's surely a higher percentage now than it was then.
I don’t know why this is the hill you’ve chosen to die on
1. For non-emergencies, just use social media or email, which have better anti-spam filtration.
2. For most true emergencies, "hang up and call 911" just like every doctor's office recording says.
3. For urgent non-emergencies, either accept the consequences of waiting until your can reach the person via option #1 above, or get creative. Contact friends of the person and ask if they can get ahold of them... or someone IRL near them to get their real-world attention.
4. Consider what happens if you lose or break your phone. Responsible people let a reasonable group of people know how to reach them, and the rest contact a member of that group.
A man can dream.
Of course. If I could I'd draw a salary from every employer on the planet. People be peoplin'.
When the robot talks to these spammers and telemarketers, it will try to keep them on the phone as long as possible. A minute would be good, 10 minutes would be better. As the spammers tried to avoid this, Apple and Google could improve the robots to counter.
And, within a few months of this, at most, that industry would just be dead. It can't afford to spend a half hour on each call trying to determine if they've got a real live knucklehead who will start sending cash to Nigerian princes, or just bad software tricking operators who don't speak English as a first language. Their margins would drop, their need for more sophisticated AI to try to determine if they were talking to a real person or not would skyrocket, etc. It just wouldn't be economically viable to continue.
Just looked up Robokiller...
>Robokiller is a phone app that blocks 99% of spam calls and texts with predictive analytics and audio fingerprinting.
Doesn't look like what I'm talking about at all. We don't want the calls to be blocked, we want them to linger on forever. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to understand.
You seem to think I was saying that I have this neat idea for an invention, and you're rebutting with "someone already thought of that".
I was describing "this needs to be a policy, if only a soft one, and only these two gigantic companies have the sway to do that". So you've totally misread things. It didn't click for you. That happen to you much? I guess I shouldn't ask, you wouldn't know even if that were the case.
> Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.
The former is cheap enough that yes, they would engage for 15 minutes. The latter are smart enough to understand what's going on so that they'd hang up.
No, they wouldn't. This isn't "hey, when they call some random number and talk to a grandma that will never buy their stuff/scams, is wasting 15 minutes that once a big deal for them".
It's 15 minutes on every call, or enough that they can't filter down to those who will end up sending money.
> The latter are smart enough to understand what's going on so that they'd hang up.
That's debatable. But even if they are smart enough, please describe what logic you think they're using that they can tell pre-recorded voice responses from a live person? What exactly would go on in one of those calls? Did his "oh sure, uh huh" sound a little too much like the last one?
They're not supergeniuses.
So illegal in the sense that artificial robocalls are already illegal, then.
One of the biggest problems with robocalls is that it's really impossible to know who's calling you, and that SPAM reporting tools don't have much teeth.
IE, when I have an incoming call, I should be able to see who's liable for the call. IE, "[phone number] is registered to [Person or corporation]", and that reports of spam should impede that party's ability to use the phone network.
Edit: actually the more I think about your comment, the less sense it makes. What information could be gained by an anonymous phone call? Please walk me through this scenario, because I don't see it at all. Who is giving away sensitive information to an anonymous caller that they wouldn't give if there was caller ID?
My doctor's office won't leave messages, and appears to have about 20 minutes a day where they pick up the phone, so, if I don't pick up when they call, then I can't talk to them. (I know, I know, get a new doctor. But this is my third try to find a specialist who's willing to go beyond "here are some easy suggestions that you've already told me don't apply to you," and there are only so many battles that I can pick before I just run out of specialists entirely.)
To reiterate, calls need to say who's calling. They don't need to come from a number that will be answered.
It's about liability, and making sure there are consequences for spamming.
And anonymity against your interlocutor is usually a very bad thing. Even though there are a few exceptions.
Google your name and you’ll likely find much more information than the white pages ever had. I found an old email address of mine from the 90s that is long gone, every place I’ve ever lived, relationships to various family members, my parent’s address dating back decades, even my grandfathers last couple addresses and he’s been dead for over 20 years.
About 10 years ago someone on eBay tried to pull something on me and I was trying to figure out what I was dealing with. Within 45 minutes I had his name, parent’s names, phone number, and their address. I didn’t do anything with it, but it wasn’t that hard to find, with nothing more than a username or email address.
But.. there is money on the line. Clearly, money from telemarketers/scammers/whoever is using this tech is enough to make telecoms hesitate from actually doing something about it.
The example given was child support, which is financial, not visitation. I’m assuming this person would be an ex-husband, and that abuse, leading to assurance that he can’t track you down, means visitation with the kid is off the table.
Also, why do I seem to always get spam from a few providers? And why aren't we holding them accountable?
If you're a carrier, it pays to terminate all calls -- spam or not -- by delivering them to your actual customer. You get paid by the originating carrier, and in a lot of cases you also get to charge your customer per-minute fees (or use up their prepaid minutes).
This is the norm for standard carriers in Europe too.
(What makes me sad is that I mostly use Google Voice; and that blocks spam pretty well. But people can still call my actual mobile number by guessing it, and they do.)
Google Voice has gotten somewhat difficult recently because some API-to-SMS services consider it "VOIP", and so they flat-out refuse to send text messages. Some places do this on purpose (Discord won't let me use it for 2FA because 2FA is really their anti-spam mechanism, not a security feature), and some places do it by accident (I couldn't add my Fidelity FSA debit card to Apple Pay because it simply won't send the verification code to my number on file). So some people have my "real" phone number now and it makes me sad, but that's why they call it the Internet Of Shit. (I don't even WANT SMS 2FA. Less secure than making your password 1234. Harder to use than a Nomad. Please let me use my Yubikey or a Passkey.)
> Signed traffic between Tier-1 carriers increased to 85% in 2023
We're getting there, just not soon enough. The whole world will have transitioned to never answering their phone before this actually is fully enforced.
I think the FCC needs to step up and have a hard deadline for STIR/SHAKEN with fines for operators who don't comply. That is the only way, IMHO, that the VOIP operators will take it seriously.
Robocalls every election season go out to targeted communities telling them the wrong polling location.
I will leave as an exercise to the reader what political slant those communities almost always have. The impact of those must be very hard to measure.
> Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.
Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 27, 2017
> The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was... Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found... After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election."
Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 13, 2018
> When it comes to implementing a solution [to influence campaigns opposed by both parties], certainly some investors disagree with my approach to invest so much in security. [Read the 3,300 word description of concrete actions here https://www.facebook.com/notes/737729700291613/]
Do you know who the real "chucklefucks" are? The people telling Mark Zuckerburg "plausible" stories with first principle inductive reasoning about what is or is not important on Facebook. It was a huge mistake to listen to them between November 4th and November 11th, 2016, just when he issued his first erroneous comment. He controls all the data on Facebook and has the means to analyze it, so he had absolutely no reason to listen to those people at all. He should have just waited and found out what the real answer was.
You're making a good faith comment. But you don't really know what evidence there is. In fact you don't know anything about it at all. You have no reason to speculate, because campaigns and phone companies have all of the data needed to answer the question, and agitating them to answer it is the right thing to do. Mistakes happen from people conflating fast answers with correct ones. Even Mark Zuckerburg does. So your answer is good because it is fast and inductive and first principles, but it is also really, really bad because it requires no reading, no analysis and no real knowledge, just fuzzy-wuzzy podcast-and-pop-sci takeaways. Sucking the air out of the room with a fast and cheap answer undermines the people trying to investigate influence campaigns. So you can be sincere and co-opted at the same time.
I mean, by all means send people who do this stuff to prison. I'm not saying it shouldn't be taken seriously. But I don't think it really works at any kind of scale.
3-7 votes per 1k calls
I believe this is a quickly adopted band-aid in response to the recent political scam calls that pretended to be President Biden telling voters to skip voting in the primary.
It is going to be an interesting year.
Because I get 2-3 a day on my Pixel and they annoy the poop out of me, even though I don't answer them.
Reminds me of the story about overhearing Juul employees on BART talk about how hard they were working to make sure their kids never got anywhere near their product and that if other parents didn't do that, what happened next was their own fault.
Automated voice messages were already restricted, this ruling just affirms that AI generated voices fit the categorization of automated voice messages.
Here's some relevant text from the ruling:
> II. BACKGROUND > 3. The TCPA protects consumers from unwanted calls made using an artificial or prerecorded voice. See 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1). > In relevant part, the TCPA prohibits initiating “any telephone call to any residential telephone line using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of the called party” unless a statutory exception applies or the call is “exempted by rule or order by the Commission under [section 227(b)(2)(B)].” 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(B). The TCPA does not define the terms “artificial” or “prerecorded voice.”
and later
> III. DISCUSSION > 5. Consistent with our statements in the AI NOI, we confirm that the TCPA’s restrictions on the use of “artificial or prerecorded voice” encompass current AI technologies that resemble human voices and/or generate call content using a prerecorded voice.
Incredibly prejudiced judicial procedure, given the power, size, globalization, and ease of automated calling systems vs the normal people they most affect. Multiplied by an already burdened court system.
> Automated voice messages were already restricted, this ruling just affirms that AI generated voices fit the categorization of automated voice messages.
This is helpful. This isn't a tip-of-the-spear ruling, then, just something that affirms another ruling. But regardless, it sounds easy but in fact necessitates a huge amount of burden.
Well sure, the FCC should mandate a code to dial after a call that induces an electric shock into the most recent caller; I think *ZAP should do it. But we have to work with what's available :P
It seems like we have been trying to legislate away spam callers for a while now, but enforcement is pretty lacking.
For now this could be seen as an incentive for TTS solution providers - build a product that is hard to distinguish from an actual human calling. In many cases the results are already convincing.
And what about the future. Please scan your retina to initialize the phone call? Please solve a captcha to start a phone call? Your workplace registered 12948230 calls in the last 24 hours, but employs only 3 workers registered as humans, pay fine now? Interesting times.
If not - why would advertisers pay for that? If yes, that feels like a job and not like my personal email account - I wouldn’t want that.
When the doctor's office can't get a hold of you, now you're looking at 6 months longer until you get to see the specialist you've been waiting for.
When probation can't get a hold of you, now you're looking at an unannounced visit, violation, and/or arrest warrant. This happened DAILY when ankle monitors suddenly malfunctioned and communicated that they'd been cut off or that I was violating home confinement by leaving unannounced.
But that's just my experience I guess.
related, i found out within the last month via mail, after-the-fact, that Progressive had canceled my car insurance due to a billing change, and so i couldn't legally drive that week. you'd think an insurance billing department of all places would leave a message if they can't get hold of you immediately, but nope. not their policy. i guess the spammers have ruined things so much that if Progressive did leave a message most people (myself included) would mistake it for a phishing attempt anyway.
One thing I really noticed was the dramatic drop in call volume once I stopped answering calls. Once I stopped answering, they stopped trying to call. People are basically being trained not to answer the phone.
Agreed, though, "don't try this at home" should be emphasized more.
The text of the ruling says "prior express consent" instead of unsolicited. That seems clear, but I wonder whether it is in practice. Is the one of those things where, by signing up for website A and agreeing to their terms by clicking a checkbox, I am agreeing to allow my phone number to be called by robits from companies B-Z, because of some line buried in the middle of the legal text I didn't read? I.e. "The User consents to contact for any purpose by Website A and our partners", and a partner is defined as anybody who buys their contact list from them?
That is a case where the nature of T&Cs and end-user agreements makes the words "express" and "consent" more abiguous than they ought to be, since they rarely match anyone's definitions except the law's.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/06/29/2023-13...
But of course, this is considered an important part of political campaigning, and probably no one appointed to chair the agency will let it happen.
Banks doing this is an exceptionally bad idea. It’s one thing to Robo call and be clear your virtual agent (though bad - and I like the idea of it being illegal), it is extraordinarily creepy and offensive to impersonate a human.
A useful use case for the unsolicited caller. I don't believe there is a single useful use case for an unsolicited robocaller for the receiver to begin with, regardless of the voice being human or not.
So, if I call my vet to make an appointment, is that solicitated or unsolicited?
> Consistent with our statements in the AI NOI, we confirm that the TCPA’s restrictions on the use of “artificial or prerecorded voice” encompass current AI technologies that resemble human voices and/or generate call content using a prerecorded voice. Therefore, callers must obtain prior express consent from the called party before making a call that utilizes artificial or prerecorded voice simulated or generated through AI technology.
So that disclosure won't work, unless (IANAL) you have a checkbox in your signup flow that says "Yes, I consent to allowing voices generated by AI call me."
The problem is misuse of AI to impersonate a real person, and failing to disclose that the content you are about to see/hear/read has been autogenerated.
The mechanism used might solve one issue, but has turned the entire thing into a game of whack-a-mole.
*I use the term legitimate, but note I absolutely despise the use of online chatbots and imagine I’ll hate voice ones as much if not more.
One way to think of it: Why not, unless you are trying to trick someone?
On social media, there's no good UI/UX for communicating something is AI-generated without it being too verbose and defeating the point. It sounds silly, but it's the truth.
Meta's requirement for AI-generated media to be disclosed on FB/Insta has been the only push toward social media support.
It is silly. Of all problems in the world, I bet that one could be solved.
>In this Declaratory Ruling, we confirm that the TCPA’s restrictions on the use of “artificial or prerecorded voice” encompass current AI technologies that generate human voices. As a result, calls that use such technologies fall under the TCPA and the Commission’s implementing rules, and therefore require the prior express consent of the called party to initiate such calls absent an emergency purpose or exemption.
This seems a) obvious and b) not really big news. But the headline sells it well I guess.
I feel like robocalls made on behalf of actual consumers in relation to actual b2c transactions should be allowed.
Separately, it bans artificial/prerecorded voices in calls to residential lines.
Both provisions have carveouts for emergencies or when the party being called has given their prior consent.
From the declaratory ruling, any AI-generated voice call requires prior recipient consent:
> Consistent with our statements in the AI NOI, we confirm that the TCPA’s restrictions on the use of “artificial or prerecorded voice” encompass current AI technologies that resemble human voices and/or generate call content using a prerecorded voice. Therefore, callers must obtain prior express consent from the called party before making a call that utilizes artificial or prerecorded voice simulated or generated through AI technology.
This is where lawyers get to have fun. What is the line between a message in the public sphere copied and multiplied via broadcast, and a message consensually altered and multiplied via AI-then-broadcast?
Interestingly they explicitly mention AI generated voices, does that mean voices generated by traditional TTS engines are fine?
Based on the (alarming) demo on Air.ai's homepage, that sounds like it would be prohibited unless the user consented to be contacted in that manner when providing their phone number.
That being said, robocalls are bs in general. What I'm saying is not an excuse for robocalls.
I certainly close all those calls and not bother to interact with them regardless. But in terms of legality I would probably be fine with a restriction and not with an outright ban. Unsure.
Yes, I use RoboKiller. No, it doesn't stop everything. The text spam in particular has gotten crazy and it's not even close to election day.
The problem we are solving is that about 1/3 of all web leads are fraudulent. Our clients are having trouble sorting through which leads are real people who want to do business and which ones are bots/BS. This ruling is disappointing.
There are better ways to solve this problem, as described for many years here and elsewhere there should be "postage" for messaging and calling. Sender pays, and they get their money back in full if the recipient responds. Costs spammers millions, costs normal people nothing or very close.
In both cases an artificial voice is being generated. This ruling seems to trample on some basic human rights.
In the interim, this might be an understandable safeguard before elections while a clearer path forward is discovered.
I wonder if this will inspire the film industry with opposition to generative AI
I know that ElevenLabs, Microsoft, of course OpenAI have some nice voices. But I would like to use them locally, or maybe in an app?
"answer the following question to complete your call: if Sally has two eggs and Michael has one, how many do they both have?"
That feature on your Dad's phone sounds like a decent step in the right direction.
So it works in some way for the CC companies at least.
Now, how is this relevant? Well, the entire cell network was offline, at least for some providers. At first it wasn't possible to send/receive data. Calls were connecting, but my friend sounded like an alien. Then for one hour, 0 communication was possible.
So even though the most efficient (I think?) protocol was used, it came to a halt
I’m pretty confident this will not stand, for one, it violates the first amendment. You can’t tell anyone what messages, voices, thoughts, expressions, they cannot transmit. That’s been actually ruled in repeatedly
(Only half joking here.)
Generally, speaking, the FCC can't pass laws, only interpret and apply them. In this instance they are not making a new law, they are declaring that the powers granted to them under the TCPA (a law passed by Congress in 1991) allows them to regulate/ban AI voiced calls.
> Name me one good robocall.
Government services. Voter info, school closures, water outages, etc.
this is a baseless distinction.
if there's not a human on the other side, it's illegal. easy to prove, record a call, ask some dumb questions and all is simple.
this is a pointless line.
I suspect these things would completely end after 10 instances of the state getting out of the way and allowing nature to handle things the way it has successfully handled things for the entire history of humanity until very recently.
(Also, look at how old my account is and consider whether or not I care about your downvote. Reply with something that directly refutes the point I'm making so we can have the vibrant discussion this website used to be known for. Downvotes are simply pathetic attempts to silence correct views. Intellectuals have discussions, not censor their opponents. Only the most indefensible and mediocre positions depend on censorship and explains why the most unimpressive ideas depend on it.)
With the result that (assuming the existing robocallers all quit) the only robocalls one would get would be politician robocalls.
In any case, most all of the current robocalls are already "illegal" under one or more existing laws/regulations, yet they still occur because the ones making the robocalls face few (if any) penalties for violations.
I'm braced..
...How? How can this be enforced? What are the new tools? Based on the news release and documentation, fiat in this case means nothing but posturing, at most being hopeful some imaginary future tool will be able to bring execution to legislation.
If the White House did pressure the FCC to implement a specific rule I'm pretty sure that would be a problem. The White House can obviously set general priorities, like protecting consumers from high fees, but isn't supposed to push specific rules, like requesting a new rule to ban hidden fees. PR in this case, if the White House specifically requested a ban on ML-generated robocalls that would be a problem as far as I understand it.
Do libertarians have a strong view on this topic, and what is it?
Regarding the comments, I see very few inflammatory or divisive comments. The average comment here seems to be poking fun at the fact that robocalls are already illegal, and that banning the more specific "AI robocall" seems like security theater.
Anyway, is it sad, really, for folks on hacker news to discuss regulations on information technology? Especially when the regulation pivots on, of all things, "AI"?
Why? Because creating hate and fear through variouis forms of media is a key part of politics. For example, local media (newspapers, radio and TV) are very big on ppushing crime hysteria narratives, despite crime being near all time lows.
There's too much vested interest in unlimited robocalls to let this ruling stand.
The one exception to all this is if you use an AI-generated voice to impersonate someone to say something they never said but this is already illegal on the grounds of defamation. The same applies to any deepfakes.
The real problem is that the phone network as it exists now needs to die. Add to that the decades-long effort to pack the court and overturn campaign finance laws (ie Citizens United v. FEC).
So I suspect this move will go nowhere. This will probably be even easier to challenge when SCOTUS overturns Chevron, as most expect them to do, essentially gutting executive agency power.