This kind of thing is why a lot of people dropped their land line. Sure it was made largely redundant with mobile, but it also became primarily a nuisance.
Facebook and others keep that in mind as you relentlessly monetize without offering value to people.
>Facebook and others keep that in mind as you relentlessly monetize without offering value to people.
Pretty much all of my communication on Facebook Messenger is with my friends, and the rest is with some groups I'm in to find local events, which I could leave hassle-free at any time with the click of a button. No communication with spammers or businesses, with the exception of someone with an obviously hacked account once every few years.
With the rare exception, my incoming calls on my phone are either my doorbell (which I answer if I'm expecting someone), or spammers (who I don't answer).
So I would say Facebook keeps this in mind much better than the phone company.
Although even today I still have a "house phone", I haven't used a POTS land line in 15 years or more - I switched to VoIP long ago because of related nuisances.
The straw that broke the camel's back was that somebody had their fax machine to send something to a (wrong) number every night at 2am. The phone company said they had no way to just block that number for us, but that for abusive calls we could talk to the police. The police said they couldn't do anything because although it was an extreme nuisance, it didn't fit the legal definition of abusive. Since we were going to have to change our number because of this anyway, we decided to just move to a platform with which we really could manage blacklists and such.
A prior experience had a debt collection agency calling us a couple of times a week, asking for some guy we never heard of. Each time we'd tell them that this was a wrong number, but they'd just call back a couple days later anyway. I tried using logic: the person they were looking for apparently had a Florida address, while the number they were calling at was a NJ number (back when you could pretty definitively link phone numbers to geography). The guy calling us agreed that it didn't make sense, but that didn't matter. I finally told them that the guy was deceased, and oddly, they seemed to buy that.
Anyway, my experience suggests that the demise of land lines has been not just because of the nuisance itself, but also because the technology and regulatory situation didn't allow people any effective way to deal with it.
Makes me wonder what that will eventually mean to email, SMS, etc., if anything.
EDIT: my current solution for spam calls on our VoIP line is three-pronged.
1) Known abusers are blacklisted, never to be heard from again. I don't really use this, though, because they're probably just spoofing the number anyway.
2) Everybody on my contact list can freely ring our phone, no problem.
2) Otherwise, the call is intercepted by a voice response system. It just tells them that if they want to talk to us, to push "2". Bots never do that, so we're very nearly 100% free of spam calls.
My grandparents had this so bad. I stayed with them a few times over the last few years, for weeks or months at a time as we dealt with some family tragedies.
One day I decided to keep track of how many telemarketer and scam/spam/Medicare/insurance/banking-fraud calls they got in one day. I lost count somewhere in the 15-20 region. It was constant.
> This kind of thing is why a lot of people dropped their land line.
Really? I get just about zero spam calls (maybe 1-2/year) on my landline (which I've had since the 90s).
But I could subscribe to extended car warranties twenty times per day on my cellphone if I answered those calls.
I always answer the landline phone because it is just about guaranteed to be a real call. I absolutely never answer my cellphone because it is a lost cause.
I block all calls by default on my cellphone as well. If you want to reach me but you don't have my whatsapp/facebook/etc. then you probably shouldn't reach me anyway.
Nintendo can garnish a dude's wages to the tune of $10M for the rest of his life for IP violations but we can't put the screws on a phone scammer that steals from our grandmothers? Sheesh.
Implementing a challenge system could be a potential solution. In this system, each outgoing call would require the caller to pay a dime as a deposit. If the recipient marks the call as legitimate after the conversation, either through the app or website, the caller would receive the dime back.
To ensure customer convenience, inbound business numbers could have the option to opt out of the challenge deposit requirement, allowing customers to call in without any deposit.
While requiring all outgoing calls to be charged might be more effective, it might not be a popular direction, especially in the United States. Thus, the challenge system with a deposit and the optional opt-out for inbound business numbers appears to be a more balanced and acceptable approach, considering both the need for legitimacy verification and user satisfaction.
The recipient of the call would have zero incentive to mark any call as legitimate, so this system would not work due to sheer apathy. All calls would automatically be considered illegitimate.
Unless you're proposing to also fine people 10 cents for every call that they receive that they don't mark as legitimate or illegitimate? That's not going to be popular either.
While that would be a solution, it appears to be a solved problem. Neither my Portugese, nor my Danish number receives any robocalls. Frinds with US numbers get a lot of robocalls, though.
> each outgoing call would require the caller to pay a dime as a deposit
This means the single mom whose account is overdrawn, with only a debit card, can't call their bank to have the overdraft fee waived. For lack of ten cents.
I haven't answered the phone in years. All calls from unknown numbers go straight to silent, and anyone in my contacts knows not to call me anyway. What kind of real person uses the phone nowadays? It's literally scams, customer support, billing departments, credit collection agencies, and generally people you don't talk to as long as you can avoid it. Normal people use FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, etc.
There's basically zero upside to phone calls, and frankly nor is there much for SMS either. I would suggest that phone companies completely deprecate their telecom networks and go all-in on internet, but then the spam would migrate to the apps (it's already begun with whatsapp), so I don't want to give them any ideas.
I’m not trying to sound snide, but maybe you’ve not had many major life events during a few years?
If you move to a new house or apartment for example, you might quickly find that the luxury of not taking any calls quickly leads to missed appointments and extra paperwork. I know this because when I moved last time, phone calls started pouring in from electricians, movers, landlords and who knows what else. The entire project would have been impossible without answering a regular phone call.
This seems like either a regional and/or phase of life difference. As a homeowner in Canada for example, I often have need to find contractors for home items for example, like I just replaced a few windows.
Most of those businesses do not operate primarily (or at all) over email or sms so leaving phone messages and receiving calls from unknown numbers is normal. Investment firms also generally need occasional contact etc.
So I guess all I’m saying (as someone who would rather use text whenever possible) is that there is still many legitimate use cases for receiving phone calls.
> What kind of real person uses the phone nowadays?
Tell me you have no kids without telling me you have no kids.
> Normal people use FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, etc.
What? No. Just call me on my phone. The actual phone, landline. You can call me on my cellphone but I'm not answering, leave a message. I might check it someday.
You will never reach me on these proprietary third party walled-garden apps. I don't do proprietary.
I barely use my phone, yet calls is 99% of what I do. I get less than 5 unsolicited calls per year. Don't use any of the things your imaginary "normal people" use. What a weird thought process. I guess the world does revolve around you
I don't even try to stop the scams anymore for the most part. I just assume that anything incoming is a scam until I am able to verify it. It is kind of crazy making, but maybe not as crazy making as trying to stop the flood.
Tmobile and others have some ot-in feature that prevent most of the scam calls from getting to your phone. I went from a couple a day to a couple a week after turning it on.
Previously the FCC has collected $0. The most they ever collected was a few thousand. They have to ask another agency to enforce these and by then Shady Telecom LLC has been shutdown by the owners without any forwarding address.
they've collected considerably more than that, but you're right that it's not likely to be anywhere near $300M. but it's up to justice to collect, something the fcc wants to change (as Rosenworcel says ITA).
Because it would kill cold sales calls, which I think have a ton more value than you probably think they do (when ethically done).
For reference for a business I previously owned:
- Per 100 cold calls based on leads we qualified…
- We actually spoke to about 30 people…
- Of which about 10 were actually interested…
- Of which about 3 became customers.
- Customers paid on a monthly basis for an average of well over two years for our service.
For loosely qualified cold calls, this was a pretty big success, imho.
Yes, we mildly bothered 70 people (unanswered call), and we bothered 20 more with an unwanted sales pitch (usually less than one minute), but we had good conversations with 10 of them. Whether they became a customer or not, I think that we at least helped them understand clearly what their options were in our product market.
It's insane that this is not a solved problem. Here's a thought: if I could collect $100 from my carrier for each spam call they put through, this problem would be solved overnight.
You can collect $$ for spam calls already in the United States, with laws on the books today- see the [TCPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Consumer_Protection_...). Problem is that you have to track down the individual/company that's doing it. That's become dramatically more difficult over the past 15 years.
This is the way to do this. If more of these scam calls & texts are found to be coming through certain pipes, fine those parties, jail those parties so that there is an incentive to stop it. I don't know why its taking them this long to figure this out.
couldn’t disagree more. this is pointless and useless. jail time is required, not an uncollectable fine from the perps. a more palatable solution would be fining telcos (because it’s collectible and damaging) for allowing it. we’ll then see good blocking measures in place.
A hack someone introduced me to that I cannot recommend enough if you still, for some God-unfortunate reason, have a landline:
Record the audio for the "We're sorry, this number has been disconnected" message from Verizon or whoever. Keep it on your phone. If you get a lot of telemarketers, queue it up before you answer an unknown number. Hit 'em with it if it sounds like a robocall.
Robocalls still cost time even if they're functionally free money-wise, so a lot of systems will key on that message and will yank your number off their call list.
the telco industry failed terribly to innovate around the phone-line and the mobile-line.
phone line: hoisted for internet services, then customers dumped it
mobile line: being hoisted for internet services, customers will soon dump them too
I've noticed an influx of robocalls that get through my pixel 4 spam call filter. Recently when I get these, unless I'm in a hurry, I play nice with the robot and they connect me to a real person. Either I'll waste their time by acting sincere but stupid, or I'll tell them a sob story, eg, sorry, I don't need your home insurance because I got fired from my job, so my wife divorced me, and now I'm homeless and living out of my car.
What I'm really hoping for is a real-time AI app that can (a) understand what they are saying and generate plausible time wasting responses.
FCC the regulator agency charged with regulating telecom companies once again fails to regulate telecom companies. Despite a trivial and permanent remedy beeing available, e.g. fine the telecom companies in significant excess of what they made from providing the robocalling companies with the services required to make the robocalls, they instead place a ineffectual and unenforceable fine on a couple of soon to be chapter 11 LLC. Yay for telecom lobbying....
[+] [-] phkahler|2 years ago|reply
Facebook and others keep that in mind as you relentlessly monetize without offering value to people.
[+] [-] MiddleEndian|2 years ago|reply
Pretty much all of my communication on Facebook Messenger is with my friends, and the rest is with some groups I'm in to find local events, which I could leave hassle-free at any time with the click of a button. No communication with spammers or businesses, with the exception of someone with an obviously hacked account once every few years.
With the rare exception, my incoming calls on my phone are either my doorbell (which I answer if I'm expecting someone), or spammers (who I don't answer).
So I would say Facebook keeps this in mind much better than the phone company.
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|2 years ago|reply
The straw that broke the camel's back was that somebody had their fax machine to send something to a (wrong) number every night at 2am. The phone company said they had no way to just block that number for us, but that for abusive calls we could talk to the police. The police said they couldn't do anything because although it was an extreme nuisance, it didn't fit the legal definition of abusive. Since we were going to have to change our number because of this anyway, we decided to just move to a platform with which we really could manage blacklists and such.
A prior experience had a debt collection agency calling us a couple of times a week, asking for some guy we never heard of. Each time we'd tell them that this was a wrong number, but they'd just call back a couple days later anyway. I tried using logic: the person they were looking for apparently had a Florida address, while the number they were calling at was a NJ number (back when you could pretty definitively link phone numbers to geography). The guy calling us agreed that it didn't make sense, but that didn't matter. I finally told them that the guy was deceased, and oddly, they seemed to buy that.
Anyway, my experience suggests that the demise of land lines has been not just because of the nuisance itself, but also because the technology and regulatory situation didn't allow people any effective way to deal with it.
Makes me wonder what that will eventually mean to email, SMS, etc., if anything.
EDIT: my current solution for spam calls on our VoIP line is three-pronged.
1) Known abusers are blacklisted, never to be heard from again. I don't really use this, though, because they're probably just spoofing the number anyway.
2) Everybody on my contact list can freely ring our phone, no problem.
2) Otherwise, the call is intercepted by a voice response system. It just tells them that if they want to talk to us, to push "2". Bots never do that, so we're very nearly 100% free of spam calls.
[+] [-] TheNewsIsHere|2 years ago|reply
My grandparents had this so bad. I stayed with them a few times over the last few years, for weeks or months at a time as we dealt with some family tragedies.
One day I decided to keep track of how many telemarketer and scam/spam/Medicare/insurance/banking-fraud calls they got in one day. I lost count somewhere in the 15-20 region. It was constant.
[+] [-] vkou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjav|2 years ago|reply
Really? I get just about zero spam calls (maybe 1-2/year) on my landline (which I've had since the 90s).
But I could subscribe to extended car warranties twenty times per day on my cellphone if I answered those calls.
I always answer the landline phone because it is just about guaranteed to be a real call. I absolutely never answer my cellphone because it is a lost cause.
[+] [-] baby|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miked85|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeyouse|2 years ago|reply
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2013/02/...
[+] [-] jabroni_salad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edgyquant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsignedint|2 years ago|reply
To ensure customer convenience, inbound business numbers could have the option to opt out of the challenge deposit requirement, allowing customers to call in without any deposit.
While requiring all outgoing calls to be charged might be more effective, it might not be a popular direction, especially in the United States. Thus, the challenge system with a deposit and the optional opt-out for inbound business numbers appears to be a more balanced and acceptable approach, considering both the need for legitimacy verification and user satisfaction.
[+] [-] coder543|2 years ago|reply
Unless you're proposing to also fine people 10 cents for every call that they receive that they don't mark as legitimate or illegitimate? That's not going to be popular either.
[+] [-] madsbuch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c0nsumer|2 years ago|reply
https://ribboncommunications.com/company/media-center/blog/o...
[+] [-] j-bos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
This means the single mom whose account is overdrawn, with only a debit card, can't call their bank to have the overdraft fee waived. For lack of ten cents.
[+] [-] TechBro8615|2 years ago|reply
There's basically zero upside to phone calls, and frankly nor is there much for SMS either. I would suggest that phone companies completely deprecate their telecom networks and go all-in on internet, but then the spam would migrate to the apps (it's already begun with whatsapp), so I don't want to give them any ideas.
[+] [-] hnarn|2 years ago|reply
I’m not trying to sound snide, but maybe you’ve not had many major life events during a few years?
If you move to a new house or apartment for example, you might quickly find that the luxury of not taking any calls quickly leads to missed appointments and extra paperwork. I know this because when I moved last time, phone calls started pouring in from electricians, movers, landlords and who knows what else. The entire project would have been impossible without answering a regular phone call.
[+] [-] Amasuriel|2 years ago|reply
Most of those businesses do not operate primarily (or at all) over email or sms so leaving phone messages and receiving calls from unknown numbers is normal. Investment firms also generally need occasional contact etc.
So I guess all I’m saying (as someone who would rather use text whenever possible) is that there is still many legitimate use cases for receiving phone calls.
[+] [-] jaclaz|2 years ago|reply
I must be abnormal.
[+] [-] jjav|2 years ago|reply
Tell me you have no kids without telling me you have no kids.
> Normal people use FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, etc.
What? No. Just call me on my phone. The actual phone, landline. You can call me on my cellphone but I'm not answering, leave a message. I might check it someday.
You will never reach me on these proprietary third party walled-garden apps. I don't do proprietary.
[+] [-] beebeepka|2 years ago|reply
I barely use my phone, yet calls is 99% of what I do. I get less than 5 unsolicited calls per year. Don't use any of the things your imaginary "normal people" use. What a weird thought process. I guess the world does revolve around you
[+] [-] ericksoa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babyshake|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larperdoodle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supertrope|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devindotcom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Google234|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coding123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgustard|2 years ago|reply
Wait, why isn't every human under such a ban?
[+] [-] jhallenworld|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnpnp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csa|2 years ago|reply
Because it would kill cold sales calls, which I think have a ton more value than you probably think they do (when ethically done).
For reference for a business I previously owned:
- Per 100 cold calls based on leads we qualified…
- We actually spoke to about 30 people…
- Of which about 10 were actually interested…
- Of which about 3 became customers.
- Customers paid on a monthly basis for an average of well over two years for our service.
For loosely qualified cold calls, this was a pretty big success, imho.
Yes, we mildly bothered 70 people (unanswered call), and we bothered 20 more with an unwanted sales pitch (usually less than one minute), but we had good conversations with 10 of them. Whether they became a customer or not, I think that we at least helped them understand clearly what their options were in our product market.
[+] [-] plagiarist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipython|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coding123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombat-man|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] footlose_3815|2 years ago|reply
We should also retire auth-less POTS.
[+] [-] say_it_as_it_is|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|2 years ago|reply
Record the audio for the "We're sorry, this number has been disconnected" message from Verizon or whoever. Keep it on your phone. If you get a lot of telemarketers, queue it up before you answer an unknown number. Hit 'em with it if it sounds like a robocall.
Robocalls still cost time even if they're functionally free money-wise, so a lot of systems will key on that message and will yank your number off their call list.
[+] [-] TylerE|2 years ago|reply
Can't pay it? C-Suite goes to prison.
[+] [-] al_be_back|2 years ago|reply
phone line: hoisted for internet services, then customers dumped it mobile line: being hoisted for internet services, customers will soon dump them too
biggest issue: privacy & security - it's a spammers, scammers paradise.
fines won't fix the underlying issues (telco)
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|2 years ago|reply
What I'm really hoping for is a real-time AI app that can (a) understand what they are saying and generate plausible time wasting responses.
[+] [-] youniverse|2 years ago|reply
'Your google business listing is about to expire, if you are the business owner please press 1.'
Then it will connect you to someone from the US who will ask if you are the owner and if you say no they just hang up on you!
If you are the owner they pitch you on some nonsense google business enhanced listing for a $300-$500 one time payment.
[+] [-] midjji|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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