Every time I get a call from a number I don't recognize I do this ridiculous dance where I try to Google the number (usually on my phone) before the ringing stops. If it shows up on enough spam caller sites (whocallsme, etc), I don't answer and add the number to my "SPAM" contact that currently contains about a billion phone numbers.
It's ridiculous that it took Google so long to implement such a basic feature on their phones.
I find Googling phone numbers to return nothing but junk sites trying to leach ad revenue off of those queries, with little in the way of actual information.
I just don't answer the call. If I don't know who you are, and you can't be bothered to leave a message … why should I care?
Empirically, half of upstate New York seems to think my number is the one they're looking for. Back before I stopped answering calls, I had to repeatedly tell one unknown number over SMS that this wasn't the number they were looking for. Over SMS. I hope that that number didn't have a smartphone, as my reply of "This isn't the number you're looking for." would quite probably have been right there on the screen as he typed in the next message, again to the wrong number.
I actually have a few of the more common wrong numbers in my contacts list, and some of them still call regularly. (Never leaving a message.)
Frequently, I'll be told after an appointment (doctor, accountant, etc.) to expect a call from someone, but won't be told what number they'll be calling from. Since whatever information they want to tell me is Confidential™, they won't bother to leave me a voicemail with a single distinguishing detail, either, instead just saying "Please call us back at [number], we have important information to discuss." Which is... exactly the same message the telemarketers leave.
This is important for some people in vulnerable situations who don't want someone else to know they're going to a doctor. "Significant others" screening calls and googling the numbers (even w/o answering the phone) could lead to a bad situation.
There must be a better solution, this can't be working well for most of their customers and sounds more the sort of nonfunctional process a lawyer would come up with.
I understand that there are people in vulnerable situations, but that is not the norm. Perhaps a check-box on the HIPAA form that indicates they need "confidential voicemail and SMS messages" would be a better solution.
Agreed upon code words in the message. I had a friend who was told that if she received a call regarding a particular sensitive matter, the person on the phone would start the call (whether she answered or not) with "Hey, it's Jenny" If someone was listening in to the call/message, it'd be easy to just say "Sorry, I think you have the wrong number."
Trouble is, sometimes people feel uncomfortable bringing up the subject, so it takes the professional who is calling bringing it up to see any benefit.
I do not think that a checkbox is appropriate - at any point, you might become concerned with the privacy of a matter, or you might not realize that privacy is a concern for you. For instance, consider someone who accidentally listens to a message stating that they are now pregnant, at work. Their employer now has advanced notice of a pregnancy, but no knowledge of the employee's intentions with regard to work. That is going to change the dynamic of the workplace, even if the employer does not intend anything nefarious. I really think the only graceful solution to this is agreed code words.
We can only expect so much from the people who work at these offices. It's probably a bad idea to listen to voicemail messages at work via speakerphone; if someone does do this I think it's on them to deal with the repercussions... It doesn't strike me as reasonable to put the onus on the person leaving the message. Voicemail is tied to a phone or requires a PIN number and this seems to meet the bare minimum security requirements.
I agree that code words may be more effective than simply checking a box, but I maintain my position that it should be opt-in. I don't want to have to remember which code words mean what, or which office use code words, etc. I use my phone and email in a secure and responsible manner; explanatory text is my preference.
It certainly would seem like it's your fault if someone overhears a sensitive message, if you know it's a sensitive message. But what if you don't know it's sensitive? What if you thought your last message was something you wanted to share? Or, what if your doctor transposes your number, and calls and leaves the message on someone else's phone? Even if you've opted in to have information exposed on your voicemail, you'd still have a case for a HIPAA violation, in that case.
You're right, of course, that it's your information, and if you want to have it treated less sensitively, that's your decision. But your doctor will likely want no part in that, and will probably prefer wholeheartedly that you do what you want with that information once it is in your possession.
What would be interesting is establishing a secure communication channel for medical information like this. For instance, some sort of encrypted email, where HIPAA violations were not so much of a concern, because you could reasonably assume that no one could easily accidentally send the information to the wrong client, and that the client had sole access to the information. Such things come with their own concerns, though.
There is probably a better way of doing things, but I don't think it's all that hard to remember a code word. Especially since you can leave a callback number, preventing the client from needing to know who the code word was from.
I think I agree with you to some point. There have been a couple of suggestions and it's unfair of me to attribute them to you.
My concern is with a physician's office (or a bank, etc.) calling from a phone that does not provide Caller ID information and leaving a message that goes something like: "This is a message for you, please call us back at your earliest convenience." This would result in a call that I would ignore, followed by a voicemail that I would also ignore. Effectively it would mean that there would be no phone communication between myself and this office, bank, etc.
In my opinion, when you provide a bank or physician's office with your cell phone number and authorize them to contact you via that method, you are agreeing to let them leave the minimum required information. In my opinion, I need to know (1) who is leaving the message and (2) is it important. In a pinch, I will settle for (1). Without either, it may as well be static on the phone for all of the information it conveys. I disagree that I am allowing these offices to treat my information "less sensitively". On the contrary, it's my responsibility to treat my end of the communication channel sensitively.
A code word is an interesting idea, but people are pretty poor at remembering arbitrary information (on the whole). It's common for many people to use the same password for every website, since they have trouble memorizing more than a couple at a time. Code words, I fear, would have the same issue. People who don't need a code workd would forget it and they'd just be confused with the message; I think it would need to be opt-in for those who cannot secure their own side of the communication channel (voicemail, email, etc.)
Some of the electronic medical record (EMR) systems that have a public facing web interface do provide a more secure method of communicating with clinician or their office. In my experience these often mimic email and are secured via SSL, they require the typical username and password (or PIN) combination. These will probably become more popular, but I expect clinicians will still fall back to phone calls if the information is time sensitive.
For those who insist on listening to voicemail via speakerphone, it seems like the smart move is to ask the physician to contact them only through a secure website or email and never via cell phone.
Some medical providers, such as mental health clinics or reproductive health clinics, always shroud their numbers out of privacy concerns whether required by HIPPA or not.
I found that extremely annoying as a patient at Planned Parenthood, I was always sending their calls to voice-mail and then having to call back through their screening service. I still really appreciate that they do it, though, for those it makes a difference to.
> I just don't answer the call. If I don't know who you are, and you can't be bothered to leave a message … why should I care?
Just a few months back someone called me on the morning train and told me they had my debit card that I had forgotten in the vending machine.
This summer I have tipped of a couple of parents about their kids belongings because I found their phone numbers on the stuff and they didn't block me. In one case it was a rather expensive outdoors jacket forgotten by the sea that they had been searching for to no avail.
> Every time I get a call from a number I don't recognize I do this ridiculous dance where I try to Google the number (usually on my phone) before the ringing stops.
Well that's just silly. If you don't recognise the number, don't answer it.
If it's someone you know, and it's important, they'll leave a message and you can call them back. If it's someone you don't know, and they leave a nuisance message, block them.
> Well that's just silly. If you don't recognise the number, don't answer it.
I've never understood people doing this. Why not just answer the phone? It takes 1 second to realize its spam, and you hang up, without risking ignoring your friend or a new doctor's office, and without touching voicemail. I don't like getting these calls either, but 90% of the damage is interrupting what I'm doing, getting out the phone, and looking at the screen.
I can only imagine that for some people there is some sort of visceral unpleasantness with hanging up on telemarketers or something and they'd rather ignore the call.
Well this provides immediate confirmation that not only is your number a valid, in-use number, but that it's owned by someone willing to answer the phone.
It's significantly more effort than necessary when you don't recognize a #.
Half joking, but if we all answered spam calls and just kept the call going without hanging up, as a result the total number of spam calls would go down and spammers' cost would increase.
For a while I was getting a crazy number of "Rachel with Card Services" calls. Sometimes a couple a day. Usually at least one a week. And I'd block it and report it to the FTC site every time. I'd also use their "press 2 to be put on our do not call list". Then I'd press 1 and ask to be put on, but usually I couldn't even get half the sentence out before they had hung up on me.
Not sure what all these calls were accomplishing.
So I eventually started messing with them. Just wasting their time for a few minutes, acting clueless, until either they hung up or I got tired of it and told them I'd keep wasting their time if they kept calling.
Then in one call after I messed with them a few minutes, they said "Thanks for playing <my phone number>, you will continue to receive phone calls."
Let that sink in.
They knew I was just wasting their time, they knew how many phone calls they had made, they were fine with me wasting their time.
The flaw in their plan was identifying my phone number when they said that. I had 3 or 4 numbers going to my cell phone (Google voice, an old home number via Asterisk). This call came while I was switching from Verizon to Project Fi on my Google Voice number, and they identified that they were calling my Verizon number. I loved Project Fi, so I cancelled my Verizon number.
Pity the foo who got that number assigned to them.
Wait, US is still RPP? I was talking about this at the weekend as one possible reason why mobile phones didn't take off in the US as fast as they did in Europe, but assumed that they'd now caught up precisely because the ridiculous RPP setup had been done away with. How on earth does anyone in the US manage to keep their phone bill down?
You actually TALK on the phone? I have one of the smallest voice plans AT&T offers that still has unlimited text and even that has way too many minutes. I think the only number I actually call is my parents' land line. Even my dentist's office texts appointment reminders instead of calling.
I'd think one of the biggest reasons for slow adoption is the same as our broadband adoption- It's hard for effectively 2 big companies to reliably provide service for 300 million people spread out over something like 8 million km^2 (for the lower 48 states) and have it still be affordable. For example a friend of mine still didn't have internet access at all in the 2010s because they would have had to pay to have special construction done near their house in addition to the high monthly bill.
What? I pay the equivalent of 9 dollars for a plan with unlimited calls, unlimited text messages and 10GB a month of internet bandwidth. I live in Europe. Is it really that much more expensive in the US?
And 20 euro a month gives unlimited 4G and free texts with free weekend calls (free 3-to-3 every day though) and you get to keep your 20 euro to spend in the Play store.
If my girlfriend calls me and we talk for an hour, that "uses up" 60 minutes on each of our phone plans. We're both in the U.S. I'm on Verizon and she's on AT&T but the carriers don't matter, even if we were both on the same one.
Wow. I just learned that there are worse places in regards to telco rip offs then Germany. OK; I had expected that, but having both parties paying for the same phone call is some kind of twisted evil genius's plan - isn't it?
Why? We're just used to it being the other way around, where the initiator always pays. However, in an alternate universe, that could just as well be the norm.
Well for one: If I am the initiator (caller) paying is totally fine, because it is me having a stated wish to reach another person and take some of their time for whatever I wana talk about.
So being the recipient, the initiator intrudes on my time. If I accept this I have (at least in old times, before caller ID) no chance of knowing, if this intrusion has a valid (and for me valuable) reason.
Even today, I have no chance of knowing beforehand, if the caller really is adding value to my day. Therefore if my time used in the call generates added value by whatever the caller tells me (or how I feel after talking to him/her).
So if this intrusion by a caller would additionally be fee-ridden, the risk of taking a call grows exponentially.
Therefore I would let go all calls to mailbox and have the person exactly state what they intend to talk about. Even family (I hate social chit-chat calls).
So probably I would not need the phone at all except for mail-checking and in case of an emergency, as after some tries no one would want to call me. The incentive to not take a phone (at least in my case) would lead to that.
I understand it's the same type of tradeoff, and our dispute is just the magnitude on either side (and hence the proper choice of action). But it's important to recognize, as almost no one who is advocating "ignore" seems to, that you are implicitly imposing a cost on your associates. The fact that people don't freely recognize this is suspicious, but of course not a knock-down argument.
It's the difference between a quick, harmless glance away from what I'm doing and completely destroying the things I've got going on in my head.
As for why I don't answer the phone in general, the idea that someone thinks they can commandeer my undivided attention for _any_ amount of time is offensive to me. I respond to IM/email quickly enough that I'm confident I won't miss anything urgent and unlike voice, those media are asynchronous and won't interrupt whatever I'm doing.
> the idea that someone thinks they can commandeer my undivided attention for _any_ amount of time is offensive to me.
But you're participating in the framework that permits such commandeering by carrying an addressable cell phone. Society's general expectation is that someone who volunteers to buy and operate a voice-enabled phone is willing to be called.
Why not buy a data-only SIM if you disagree with that fundamental premise?
- Being able to call out is handy for interacting with antiquated infrastructure at e.g. banks, government agencies and cable companies.
- There are times when I'm willing to receive scheduled calls from e.g. my accountant, my bank (fraud checks) or phone number verification for online services.
- Being able to receive SMS is handy for verification and notifications of things like Amazon deliveries and Lyft pickups, while not being intrusive.
- I haven't found a data-only SIM that gives me unlimited bandwidth.
And I disagree that "someone who volunteers to buy and operate a voice-enabled phone is willing to be called", despite it being the norm in the past. A phone is no longer the voice + SMS device that it once was (and when it was, I would have agreed with you). It's now a small, convenient and easy to use computer, that just so happens to have a phone built in (and impossible to acquire without it).
Presumably because he wants to be able to dial out for emergencies, and to call people who don't use instant messaging or email (e.g., local businesses, or <shudder> taxi dispatch).
Plus there's the fact that many official forms require a phone number of some sort, and it seems less evil to provide a number you own but don't answer than a random one.
I don't answer calls from unknown numbers either but, out of curiosity, do you also not answer the door (of your home) if someone rings the doorbell but you aren't expecting anyone?
I live in an apartment complex and don't have a functioning intercom. The only knocks at the door I get are deliveries that I expect and monitor through online tracking.
Theoretically if someone were to knock, I would check through the peephole and then decide whether to open the door. If not, I'd tell them to leave. If they decide not to leave, I would contact law enforcement, regardless of the knocker's intent.
> Don't publish your number beside the 5 people (bank, accountant etc...) you are willing to receive call from.
Unfortunately this doesn't work. If the number itself has ever been used before (it has), it's already on a bunch of lists. Many banks and credit card providers will also share it with marketers.
It's very different in the US. Many banks/credit cards will share your contact info for marketing by default and require an explicit (and often burdensome) opt-out.
This doesn't solve robocallers trying every phone number in the country, catching the ones that accidentally answer, and making lists of those to sell to others. :/
This is what I do. Pick up, instantly determine if the call if of any significance, keep talking or hang up. Usually I never get a repeat call from spammers. If I do, I have already blocked them. This way I never miss an important call (package delivery, bank stuff, etc.).
I don't know but ignoring a call feels very unsatisfying. It keeps gnawing at me.
I find it extremely satisfying to hang up on telemarketers mid-sentence. I also add them to my block list so I dont get a repeat call from the same number.
Honestly, my phone should just not ring when I get a call from an unknown number.
I might leave a meeting to ask my mom why she's calling in the middle of the day, but I'm not going to answer my phone for an unknown number and I'm mostly pretty annoyed by anonymous calls. They're very clearly a second class citizen for my attention.
* If it's a withheld/private number, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I don't recognise, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from work/a client, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from a friend, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from a direct relative, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from a very direct relative and I've been called several times in the last minutes, I start pondering if I should pick it up or not. I usually do not, but ymmv
Is there a reason why you don't answer friends/relatives? It seems to me you would save a lot of effort by just disabling incoming calls on your number.
Basically you have a call-only phone. Supposing you're making calls you're taking advantage of everybody else not following your policy. Doesn't feel it strange not to reciprocate?
I pretty much do this too, but for a totally different reason: the volume on my phone is switched off 99% of the time. Why? Because I don't want some godawful notification sound / random video / anything at all suddenly playing at full blast in public. Although there is some kind of provision for separate volume levels for ringtone / other stuff in android, it's really difficult to manage, so I just don't bother.
Sometimes I glance at my phone, notice it ringing, and answer it; other than that, it pretty much goes unanswered.
On my Android phone, the alarm sounds even if I have the phone set to "silent". If there is a way to actually silence the phone, I'd love to know about it.
I'm very curious about how you end up with alarms configured that you don't want to go off, especially often enough for this to be a regular problem for you.
There are other technologies for messaging (hangouts, WhatsApp, etc...). Also, if the issue is friends and family, OP could simply let them know to phone only in case of emergency but to use messaging at all time otherwise.
Complaining that people phone you, people who are close to you, family and friends, and proudly boasting of ignoring the calls feels very immature to me. You don't want phone calls? Don't give out your number, find alternative techs for messaging, or at the very least make it clear to people that you don't want them to call.
>Don't give out your number, find alternative techs for messaging, or at the very least make it clear to people that you don't want them to call.
That's not how social interaction works. If someone asks for my number so they can text me, I happily give it to them. I'm not going to interrupt the conversation at that point to give them a lecture to never call me. They will get the point when I don't answer.
It's like telling people not to give out their physical address for mail if they don't want people to show up unannounced at their home.
I have a shorter checklist but the result is the same as yours. I guess I'm more efficient. Others wonder why I carry a phone at all - I don't know why.
If it's a spam call, often you will hear nothing until you say hello. When their auto-dialer hears you talk, it connects you to a real person, who informs you that the Windows box you don't possess is infected with a virus or whatever.
Honestly. The callers are breaking the social etiquette by making unsolicited calls, however if we pick up we feel obliged to be polite. Fuck that, hang up on their face.
What other people? People I actually know? I would know it's them (contact list/caller ID). It would still probably go to VM as I am not usually just sitting around waiting to answer a phone call. I will just call them back when it is convenient for me.
Caller IDs can be spoofed too. Around year back, I started getting calls asking me to stop calling them, when I had never called them in the first place. Then it clicked, someone had spam called by spoofing my number. What is googling going to do in this case?
Somehow this has happened to my parents. No clue how, but they started getting phone calls from me, calls I never made. It was just some call center in india with a credit card scam, so it was obvious that it wasn't me once they picked up.
Even stranger, I'll occasionally get a call on my home phone which the Caller ID identifies as coming from my home phone with me as the caller -- to myself! At least it makes it easy for me to spot as a spoofed caller.
Yeah it's a pet peeve of mine when people call any feature a "basic" one.
How is this basic? At a minimum it requires a database of spam numbers, a way to automatically add new ones, probably some way to deprecate numbers that are no longer spammy, a UI, and I'm sure some legal work to ensure they won't break any laws.
Oddly, Apple already has a "database of spam numbers, a way to automatically add new ones", etc., but it only functions within iMessage. Calls from the same numbers don't get detected, and there's no option to flag callers. (You can block them, but not "report as spam.")
MIUI does this. MIUI is created by Xiaomi, one of China's largest mobile phone manufacturers. It is a fork of Android. I've never installed it on a phone but have imported Xiaomi handsets that have it installed.
Samsung dialer on my S7 does warn about potential spammers. I still use Google dialer because Samsung just looks very shabby.
Another feature, which makes me facepalm in Google dialer is inability to block a spoofed number. If the phone number, which just called you, does not match some rules you get "Invalid phone number" pop up when choosing to block it.
TrueCaller has been great for me and I believe services like this could kill telemarketing overnight.
I haven't given them access to my contacts yet though so I end up looking up numbers in the app. Loathe to give this information to yet another vendor yet back when I joined WhatsApp I didn't even consider the privacy implication. Illustrates the heightened awareness of privacy we have now.
thats one of the best apps I have on my phone. use it all the time.
we recently had an election here and the amount of spam calls from candidate campaigners and election polls was crazy. truecaller saved me! (I also go to report the ones that fell through)
+1 - I use it and it has been very very useful. This despite concerns that contacts are shared for them to build their crowd sourced data, I am totally fine with it.
Oh, I love calls from telemarketers ;) It's a sport for me, a fun pass time.
I'm trying to sell them shit before they have a chance to finish their pitch.
Or I hang up on myself (hangup when I'm speaking) and see how many times they call me back (current record is at 4 before the guy figured it out).
Or pretend that I don't own a phone while on a phonecall with them.
Or ask them for their personal cell number so I can call during lunch and discuss this.
The employee gets paid, the company paying for the spamming gets a decreased ROI, mszcz gets some amusement. Not my way of dealing with these sort of calls, but in this particular case it seems like win, win and win.
Probably true. However, those calls usually last couple of minutes tops and I'm always in a good mood afterwards. To me it's more of a IRL equivalent of watching cat gifs to reset your brain every now and then ;)
I don't mind them getting paid as long as I can have a good time at their expense. And hey, maybe me laughing at them will cause them to reconsider their chosen profession (but not holding my breath).
> And hey, maybe me laughing at them will cause them to reconsider their chosen profession (but not holding my breath).
Maybe their 'chosen profession' has less in terms of freedom of choice than you think it does. There are only so many low-wage jobs available and I figure most call center operators are happy with the crappy job they've got rather than with the high moral standards one they don't or can't get.
Well, that's one side of the argument and I get it.
However, if you extend it a bit further it might mean that the inability to get a better job justifies you taking one that hurts other people - some of those telemarketers are selling useless shit, scamy subscriptions, etc. I don't fall for those but I'm not the only one receving those calls.
It's sort of breathtaking to think I've gone from a time when people were suspicious about the usefulness of computers to one where a phone telling you the call you're getting is probably useless is a basic feature that it's ridiculous to not have. WTG engineering!
It's a lot easier to ignore someone that you don't want to talk to by letting it just ring than it is answering it. Then they KNOW you don't want to talk to them.
I think it's ridiculous you have to have a Nexus phone to get this capability. Anyone with a Google account and Android should be able to get this functionality.
Right now with Google Voice I get a dozen hang up calls per day, it's always from a different number. When I don't answer, Ive got a dozen 2 second long voice mails. I used to spend a lot of time setting these to spam or being blocked, but between Google Voice and Hangouts simply asinine and beyond incompetent integration where some calls show up in Google Voice but not Hangouts and vice versa, I'm losing interest.
So recently I just decided to make the default behavior for the Google Voice number not ring any of my phones or Hangouts, but set up contact groups where friends and family should ring through. Well that's not working, I'm still getting spam and hangup calls, and some friends ring through, others don't, and client calls don't.
> I think it's ridiculous you have to have a Nexus phone to get this capability. Anyone with a Google account and Android should be able to get this functionality.
It's probably part of the Dialler app, which many other manufacturers replace with their own application.
The app is only available to Nexus devices. If you try to load that page on a non-Nexus phone, the page will show an error indicating that it is "not compatible" with your device.
It's not worth what I don't pay for it anymore. Nothing is worth this. Mosquito bites are free too, and also not worth it.
I'd pay $35 a year for the f'n basic features it has now to work as they should, but don't. I'd pay a one time fee of $35 to see Hangouts die a fast death.
> Right now with Google Voice I get a dozen hang up calls per day, it's always from a different number. When I don't answer, Ive got a dozen 2 second long voice mails.
I have exactly this problem too and I have no idea where they are coming from. I'm constantly waking up to 1 or 2 empty 2 second voicemails from random numbers. Sometimes a single number does it 2 or 3 times. I guess I an turn off voicemail, that is probably the only reasonable fix.
AFAICT, Alphabet gave up on google voice. It makes me a little nervous that's my main number. I imagine i'll soon have to roll my own thing with twilio.
Although the gv voice prompt "state your name" seems to help immensely.
Honest question: are spam calls common in the US? I don't remember when / if I got any in Spain, Netherlands or UK (places I've lived and had cellphones for a prolonged time), I do remember, however, that when I managed to score a US number with Google Voice I'd regularly get weird spammy voicemails.
>Honest question: are spam calls common in the US?
I'm not sure what happened, but lately they've been rare (I suspect there's a lot of pressure on voip providers to up their game and stop selling to scammers), but in 2015 I had one or two per day, easy. These people often faked caller-id and had different numbers each time. It was difficult to block, so I just stopped answering calls I didn't recognize.
Worse, if you answered and treated them civilly like "No thank you I'm not interested in this please remove my number," they just hang up on you and then you get a new call from a different agent an hour later reading the exact same script.
The callers were obviously Indian call centers using scratchy sounding voip connections usually pretending to be your insurance company and asking for personal information or trying to sell you no-name car insurance.
Never got a single spam call or text in Germany either. I did get a bunch of credit card phishing texts while visiting the US (on a US SIM) and one or two calls from strange numbers that I didn't answer.
No problems with a UK mobile number while I lived there. Seems like mostly landlines are affected there?
I've had the same UK mobile number for... 16 years, and I get perhaps one spam call per year.
As far as I know, numbers aren't recycled, so maybe the number is in such an old range that spammers don't bother calling it. I'm careful about who I give the number to, but I do share it.
I don't get talking on the phone. It's the lowest quality form of communication - it's ephemeral, and unlike actual face-to-face communications, all nuance and body language goes out the window. Not to mention the all-too-often piss-poor audio quality, mics that don't work half the time, and the "Can you hear me now? What was the last thing you heard?" and "Sorry, I was on mute" dances.
Voice is far better for bidirectional discussion, and is far faster overall. I can't stand having to wait for the other person to type in a response when I'm in a rush and not multitasking at the moment.
Texting is fine for discrete, concrete information conveyance or things that don't require an immediate response. Sometimes dragging out a low-priority conversation via text is fine, but it can also be a time sink.
And while you may lose body language, you still have all the nuance of vocal inflection in voice that is lost in text.
I gotta say, about 6 months ago I got an iPhone, after years of cheap/expensive Androids. I'm surprised, I don't know how the hardware's different, but audio quality is better. I used to tolerate talking on the phone, I actually like it now.
Besides, when I need to talk to a client, it's almost always faster and easier for me to make a call. 5 minutes of talking can easily bypass 15-20 minutes of writing an email.
When I'm in a call and there's a discussion that's that long, I have to take notes anyway to remember everything. So you're just transferring the typing burden onto the receiver.
I've yet to see anything that can't be more clearly, unambiguously, and quickly expressed in text or perhaps with a picture.
If it's taking too long to type, my suggestion would be to get better at typing, or distill out the wheat from the chaff of what you're trying to say. That's what really drives me up the wall with speech - the information density is typically incredibly low, and too often people let noises tumble out of their face-holes without trying to piece together a coherent thought. I realize that's harsh, but I've lost patience for rambling, stream-of-conscience external monologues. Which promptly dissolve back into the hot air from whence they came, since there is not a readily reviewable, indexed, searchable record created automatically in the process of such bloviation.
I get 'em all. Almost never answer, and block every number. I've tracked the origin of a few of them down. Found the personal cell phone of the CEO of one of the companies that was behind one daily call that changed numbers everyday. That was a fu conversation, and it did stop the call, but hopefully if both Google and Apple implement this (as is planned in iOS10) it'll end this avenue of abuse.
Phone spam has all but killed phones. Pervasive surveillance has done the rest.
Maybe not for everyone. Yet.
But where a phone was for a time a liberating device, it's become what many of its early (and I'm talking about late 19c and early 20c critics said, not late 20/early 21) critics claimed: an insistant, rude, inconsiderate, and noxious nuisance.
A phone can ring at any time, from a call initiated anywhere in the world. Low (or zero) costs mean the caller has very little reason not to call, and even a very slight probability of a positive financial return can support all measure of spam.
The fact that carrying a phone subjects you to sub-minute location tracking, puts an always-on microphone in your pocket, and leaks your identity, location, habits, and interests to the highest bidder (or marginally competent hacker) makes that a non-starter.
For the past several years, I've simply not carried a phone when I could possibly manage to, and the liberation is tremendous. (The trauma of having been on-call for years may or may not have contributed to my intense distaste for the devices.)
There are other options -- virtually any modern electronic kit has multiple messaging capabilities, from email to IRC to various messaging applications to full VOIP and voice/video messaging. Carrying a non-phone Android tablet affords some utility without the tremendous disutilities of a phone.
But, and this speaks to recent pain, the device (a Samsung Tab A 9.7" WiFi-only) is itself locked down -- not rootable, bootloader locked, and so far as I can tell, no CyanogenMod images available for it. I'd bought it whilst travelling under some duress, as an affordable and, so far as I could tell, least-bad option.
But without the ability to actually control the system, I'm still subject to spam, crud, poor management tools (simply being able to allocate and manage storage rationally appears beyonds its meagre capabilities), etc.
What Google are offering is very little, very late. And the fact that other telcos are failing to step up and address the massive disutilities of their projects is another immense failing of the market. Realising these are the same unspeakable idiots who'll be shoving Internet of Shit devices down our every orifice makes me cry for the future.
Same here, does anyone know what the heck is going on? Why has there been such a surge in the past year or two?
My uncle was an early supporter of Ooma and my parents have a box that provides their landline number that they've had for 25+ years, and they don't pay anything in terms of a monthly fee.
In spite of how great of a deal it is, the spam calls have gotten to be so bad that my parents are considering getting rid of it. It's not worth the hassle, even when it's essentially free. At least half the calls that come in are spam.
(Quick aside: Ooma deserves praise for their product. I hope they succeed and can pivot properly to other products as telephones naturally die. They contribute back to the FOSS Asterisk project and their products are reliable.
The DNC list is only effective against legitimate organizations because the only weapon it has are fines. Most of the spam calls I get are credit card scams, free cruise scams, etc. These people are already committing fraud, so DNC fines aren't going to deter them.
I believe I read that many phone spammers are based outside the US now and so have no concern with US law compliance. They just spoof US based caller ID numbers.
Same here. I own about 50 domains and I've not had privacy on many of them. My Google voice number, which is also my business number, is listed on these domain contacts and I get more spam phone calls than regular calls on that.
Most of the calls are from "one way funding" and "this is shelly, your local yahoo and google listings specialist."
I've had a Google (Voice) number for... hard to even say now, 8 years? And i.. well, i think i've only gotten a few calls to that number, ever.
In fact, i have a normal cell number (i don't link my google and cell provider numbers), and i get texted spam to it maybe twice a year, but i can't recall anything really.. ever, to my Google number.
To my knowledge i don't have any anti-spam settings enabled on Google Voice (though, they do exist). I wonder what the root cause for this is?
I often forget that "in this day and age", call spam is still an issue.
I haven't had a landline since we got one in college, in the early 2000's, mostly because it came free with the internet service, and I was going to plug in an answering machine with amusing messages.
The function existed in Chinese phone/ROMs for quite some time now. Some of the intercepters will display which type of spam, place it originates and the exact business entity name of the caller.
That doesn't work (well, not reliably) in the USA because the name/number presented in the caller ID can have little relation to the actual name/number of the caller.
I wonder if Google is doing anything beyond simply crowdsourcing spam reports based on CallerID, at least for Google Voice numbers since they own that network so may have access to some data (ANI?) that's not normally available on regular phone lines?
You make a complain and Google ignores you forever, you make 10 more complains, all of them are ignored, you're frustrated so you have to change your phone number. Same procedure when Google blocks your Gmail, youtube, analytics or adwords with unpaid money on it.
But that means giving yet another company access to all of your phone call and SMS data. Since Google already has that information, I'd rather that they provide this service rather than letting a 3rd party scan my calls and SMS's.
Yes, quite sure since I use Google Voice so all of my calls and SMS's go through their infrastructure. And even if I didn't use GV, I use their dialer, SMS, and contacts app, so they already can already see all of my calls, SMS's, and contacts.
Called ID looks up phone numbers and replaces them with the names of businesses. It does send the phone number to Google to look it up, and it does work internationally. I've lived in both Australia and Vietnam with great results.
The feature has been available for a long time and is fantastic in my opinion. When an unknown number dials it gets replaced on the screen in ~1-2 seconds with the business name, which is really useful.
If you have Caller ID enabled on a Nexus device, all of your incoming phone call numbers are already being sent to Google. Google almost certainly uses this metadata to try to identify spammers, like Gmail uses all of your mail to detect spam. The same caller calling many of their users in short succession could be more likely to be a spam caller, for instance.
Spam calling seems to be a big deal in the US. Not at all where I live. Is it because of different features of the network or because there are cheap English speakers in other countries?
It's because the relevant regulatory apparatus has been captured by the to-be-regulated industry in the USA. There's no technological gap that prevents us from dropping a smart bomb on telemarketers within minutes of their first spam call. We just don't care.
I got a call from someone who told me I had a virus and had to install some software so they could fix it. I told him he should find a new job instead of trying to steal other people's money. He repeated his script. I repeated mine. And after the third time he went off script and asked me, "can you tell me where I can find a better job?"
So there you go. Money making good people do bad things again.
Are you sure about that? In 2012 the FTC had a robocall summit with a variety of speakers. I watched the live feed and it seemed like they were quite sincere about tracking people down. It was just a hard problem given the rise of things like VOIP.
Google's implementation also warns you about potential spam callers. Google maintains a list of spam callers and you can report phone numbers to this list.
If you are an Android user and you like programming you MUST install Automagic. It is, by far, the most useful app in my phone. You can automate pretty much any task on your droid, like say: if number from incoming call is in whitelist send me alert, if not hang and reply with sms "Send name and number I will call back".
I use Extreme Call Blocker for Android. Best three dollars I ever spent in my life. My phone doesn't make any noise or visual interruptions unless the number is in my contacts list. Additionally, it answers the phone and immediately hangs it up, which prevents the number from going to voicemail. I adore knowing that strange numbers are essentially calling a sinkhole when they dial my number.
In Australia, I've signed up my numbers to the Do Not Call Register[1] and it's actually been pretty effective. I actually couldn't tell you the last time I had an unsolicited call like that.
I think iOS 10 does this as well. The funny thing is, a lot of the time I get spam phone calls that are in Spanish (I don't speak Spanish much) or when I pick up the phone, they just cut off the line. So they waste my time and theirs.
I think these are demographic specific scams, and you aren't the target demographic. Scams that target women, old people, or maybe even it's a pre-scam where it's just trying to find out if there's a human on the other end of the call and these numbers get more money when sold.
Why is it so hard for the phone company to provide accurate caller id data? I can understand the need to block outgoing caller id info and I have no problem with that. But I also have the right to not answer anonymous calls.
> CallKit. CallKit also introduces app extensions that enable call blocking and caller identification. You can create an app extension that can associate a phone number with a name or tell the system when a number should be blocked.
It's ridiculous that it took Google so long to implement such a basic feature on their phones.