T-Mobile working with Apple to bring robocall screening to iPhones
With the help of Apple, T-Mobile is aiming to bring a new anti-robocall technology to iPhones "in the near future," a report said on Wednesday.
The technology, developed in partnership with Comcast, is currently limited to a handful of LG and Samsung phones on T-Mobile and its Metro brand, according to Reuters. Authentic callers are marked as "verified," making it easier to figure out which calls to answer and which to ignore.
T-Mobile is relying on a standard called "Secure Telephony Identity Revisited (STIR) and Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN)." In fact it ultimately had little choice, since U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai told carriers in February that he would intervene if they failed to implement STIR/SHAKEN by the end of 2019. T-Mobile is however the first American carrier to do so.
AT&T should follow suit, since it tested a cross-network STIR/SHAKEN call with Comcast in March.
Robocalls have become epidemic in the U.S., now averaging over 168 million per day by YouMail metrics. Some 40 percent of that is thought to be scams.
Especially troublesome are so-called "neighbor" scams, which masquerade as calls from a person's area code. This makes it difficult or impossible to tell whether a call is from a legitimate friend or business before picking up.
iPhones already have call blocking and ID features as of iOS 10, and there are other countermeasures you can take, but these require downloading third-party apps like Hiya and aren't 100 percent effective -- in large part because of spoofing tactics.
The technology, developed in partnership with Comcast, is currently limited to a handful of LG and Samsung phones on T-Mobile and its Metro brand, according to Reuters. Authentic callers are marked as "verified," making it easier to figure out which calls to answer and which to ignore.
T-Mobile is relying on a standard called "Secure Telephony Identity Revisited (STIR) and Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN)." In fact it ultimately had little choice, since U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai told carriers in February that he would intervene if they failed to implement STIR/SHAKEN by the end of 2019. T-Mobile is however the first American carrier to do so.
AT&T should follow suit, since it tested a cross-network STIR/SHAKEN call with Comcast in March.
Robocalls have become epidemic in the U.S., now averaging over 168 million per day by YouMail metrics. Some 40 percent of that is thought to be scams.
Especially troublesome are so-called "neighbor" scams, which masquerade as calls from a person's area code. This makes it difficult or impossible to tell whether a call is from a legitimate friend or business before picking up.
iPhones already have call blocking and ID features as of iOS 10, and there are other countermeasures you can take, but these require downloading third-party apps like Hiya and aren't 100 percent effective -- in large part because of spoofing tactics.
Comments
I would simply like an option to have all calls go to VM unless the caller is in my contacts. And if no VM is left, that call is deleted and blocked. How hard can that be?
Robocalls are popular because they have “no” cost. I use the service from Jolly Roger Telephone to help with this. JR impersonates a real person answering the phone to get a real person on the line on their end. This ties up a real person and makes it actually cost the robocall outfit something because they are paying for a real person at that point. Since signing up for JR, I now relish all the telemarking calls I receive instead of fearing them or getting mad.
We have a friend who will get telemarketers on the phone and troll them incessantly if he has the time. It's rather entertaining to listen to.
Those are the majority of the ones I get. The scammers must think I live in Guangzhou or something…
It's gotten to the point where I just don't answer my phone.
I am not looking for intelligent conversation with robot that is pretending it is human so I hang up on them right away - robots do not deserve respect as humans so do not be surprised. You are wasting my time with robocalls then you are guilty - not me. All abused phone numbers are also landing on blocked list. If you pretend you are IRS - I will call IRS and report that there is business that runs scam abusing their phone number - have no doubt as one day federal agency might be on your back. Run this business correctly and you may get good commercial result.
Either way I screen all my calls anyway. if it's a caller not in my contacts and they don't leave a message -- DELETE! would be cool if that was taken care of automatically though.
Also - I'm not sure what the tech behind it is, but occasionally even local numbers get flagged as "SCAM LIKELY". Not that I was going to pick up anyway.
Instead, those calls could be made to have a different ring -- or none at all -- and just go straight to voicemail.
Or, Apple could also do the same even if caller id is on, but it is not in your list of contacts -- either give it a different ring or none at all.
This solution does not sound to be rocket science and should have been available years ago.