I get ‘em all the time as I imagine most people do. Local spoofing has gotten stupid though. I get calls on my personal iPhone that appear to be coming from my work iPhone. This particular spoof has happened 3 times to my recollection. Once when this happened I held them up side by side for my office buddies to see. They were incredulous.
I got a call from my own number on that same phone.
This bill is a piece of crap, and will work about as the do-not-call list in curbing robocalls. All 98 votes should have been against, but 97 voted aye because the bill gives the appearance to voters that congress is doing something about the problem.
The FCC already has the ability to penalize robocallers, and all this does is increase the penalties. The FCC has been completely ineffective, and raising civil penalties will do nothing because robocallers are often foreign entities, can't be located, or couldn't care less about civil penalties.
In addition, the bill:
does not require carriers to implement STIR/SHAKEN for 18 months, giving robocallers plenty of time to find a workaround
gives carriers a means to obtain exemptions and extension to STIR/SHAKEN implementation
does not provide for private right of action against robocallers, which means FCC is the only means of enforcement
does not impose any criminal penalties for spoofing a phone number, nor criminalize robocalls
does not require carriers to give consumers the means to block anonymous calls
does not fix any of the existing problems with the Do Not Call List
What Congress should have done is give consumers the right to sue scumbags who send unsolicited texts and make unsolicited calls, require carriers to immediately give consumers the ability to block anonymous or fake numbers, and criminalize violations of the Do Not Call list. But that will never happen.
A little late to reply, but thanks for spelling this all out.
While I absolutely abhor all the spam calls - and they've even started hitting me recently - I'm not sure what a good solution looks like. The telephone that people over the age of 35 or so grew up with seems to be dead and gone. More in the next comment.
I just looked it up. It was Rand Paul, which is who I suspected. I don't think he's made a statement on it yet, but he will often vote against things based on his views on government power.
But but but the free market...the free market will solve all our problems! /s
Yeah I get these calls every single day. Multiple calls a day. Often with my local area code and even some variation of my own number. I have ATT’s Call Protect service but it doesn’t help much. It also incorrectly blocks merchants I want to call me, like Capital One and Apple.
I don’t even answer the phone now unless it’s a contact.
This is kind of what I'm getting at above. I'm not sure there is a perfect solution, and far too many people have resorted to your strategy of not answering your phone unless it's a contact. Here's why that sucks.
1) It builds an expectation that everyone broadcasts their phone # to whoever they call. This is a *terrible* model; people really shouldn't be doing that by default, especially to businesses because many businesses gather your phone number, suss out whatever else they can, and sell that out to data brokers, where it gets married with all kinds of other data.
2) What happens when you ask your good friend Bob for his coworker's number? Maybe he plays softball and you need a player tonight, or maybe he's locksmith and you need to get in your house. Even if you broadcast your # to him, he's not going to answer, and the process to fix that situation requires other people putting you in their contact lists that you might not be comfortable with, especially if you knew how many places those (API-accessible) contact lists go.
3) Some of this is already happening with small or sole-proprietor businesses. Let's say I'm calling a few tradespeople to potentially do some work around the house. First, I may very well not want some of them to ever have my phone number, depending on how the conversation goes. Second, even if I do decide to hire them for a quick job, that does NOT mean I want my phone number in their mobile contact list forever! Again, these contact lists are API-accessible, and spread like wildfire. Now you're directly connected (in the eyes of fb or google or various data brokers) to "Frank" the plumber, who you find out later is on a watch list. Hmm.
4) Even among personal friends that I'm happy to let them know it's me calling, if they've enabled contact list sharing on their mobile phone (like to #$!%#*^ facebook, for example), I really do not want my number in their contacts. Ireland just said something about this in another thread, and I'm happy that it's finally getting some attention, but it's really messed up that we can't easily share things like phone numbers and addresses with friends anymore without it being broadcast to data mining companies without us having any way to control or even know about it.
So if someone simply doesn't want to have their personal contact info (and other stuff like birthdate, address, etc.) shared with random crappy companies, how do we manage relationships and contact information in the future?
raising civil penalties will do nothing because robocallers are often foreign entities, can't be located, or couldn't care less about civil penalties.
I hope you also understand that for this reason the recent agreement by telcos to not sell your location data is equally useless. Foreign entities have access to your location data via the international SS7 network.
Absolutely. Please keep hammering on this, because most people haven't a clue.
But, I'd argue the recent changes are a small improvement. The telcos often know more about you than many of the foreign (and domestic) parties that have ears on the SS7 network. And your telco has near-perfect visibility at all times, whereas I think it's not quite the same for other parties (please correct me if I'm wrong on that). I suppose the largest parties, i.e. the ones that have the enormous capacity to capture, store and analyze essentially all SMS traffic, probably know a great deal more than we'd like to think as well, based on deep analytics.
Still, each step that reduces the sale of hidden personal data, and helps educate the public in doing so, is helpful. As long as it doesn't push people to let their guard down even further.
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