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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byffkom ( 3519199 ) writes:
I vividly remember the time when corporations like Twitter (and many other) started to harvest mobile phone numbers under the pretense of "something something security". It was clear from the very start that this was just another ploy to lure people into exposing sensitive personal information to those greedy data collectors. Once collected, such data will be on sale, if not today, then soon or latest when the collecting company is sold off to some other company.
But when you tell people why you won't cross
bymjwx ( 966435 ) writes:
I vividly remember the time when corporations like Twitter (and many other) started to harvest mobile phone numbers under the pretense of "something something security". It was clear from the very start that this was just another ploy to lure people into exposing sensitive personal information to those greedy data collectors. Once collected, such data will be on sale, if not today, then soon or latest when the collecting company is sold off to some other company.
But when you tell people why you won't cross the red line to expose such personal information to companies, most are gullible enough to just laugh every concern off. Until they start complaining about the robo-calls, the SMS SPAM and so on.
I think it's gotten so bad I need one number to give to companies that are going to spam me and another number I use for my everyday phone. Just like I currently do with email.
byAmiMoJo ( 196126 ) writes:
In the UK we don't really get many spam calls. There is a telephone preference service, but I haven't bothered with it. GDPR seems to have worked well - companies can't sell your phone number without your affirmative consent.
Most of us never get SMS spam or robocalls. I get some recruiters, who have an annoying habit of calling back again immediately if I decline. That gets them insta-blocked. Pixel phones have a call screening function where the phone talks to them and asks what they want, and that usually
bySolandri ( 704621 ) writes:
The spam calls in the U.S. (at least the ones I get) mostly aren't targeted. The spammers just randomly or systematically dial numbers, so something like the GDPR (preventing the sale of your phone number) wouldn't help.
The problem is the phone companies refuse to implement a system where the call recipient can verify the caller's phone number or ID. The caller ID system is laughably easy to spoof. Blocking the number doesn't help since it's not the number the spammer is actually calling from; and it may even wind up hurting you as you may end up blocking a legitimate number that you wish to receive calls from. The rationale for callers being able to change their caller ID on their own is that each phone line here has its own phone number. If a company has one main number but uses multiple lines for outgoing calls, it will probably want to assign the caller ID on all of them to show their main number. I wouldn't have a problem if that's all they were able to do - change the caller ID value to one of their other numbers. But there is nothing to prevent them from setting the caller ID number to anything they wish. It's even possible to get a spam call here, and the caller ID shows your own phone number.
This seems like it'd be an easy problem to solve with public/private keys. Assign each phone number a private key known only to the line owner, and add the corresponding public key to a global database. When someone calls you, they encode some changing value (e.g. the time of the call) with your public key and their private key, then send you their public key. Your phone sees their public key, decodes the message using that and your private key, to confirm the time of the call, thus confirming the caller is the person who owns the private key corresponding to that public key. That makes it impossible to spoof someone else's number (you'd need their private key to do that).
But the phone companies have zero interest in actually fixing this problem because they get so much money from the spammers. In fact several of them play both sides for profit. They sell service to the spammers, then sell spam-blocking upgrades to everyone else. I don't think it'll be fixed until we do the equivalent of the IPv4 => IPv6 transition but for phone numbers, and we all know how well the phase-out of IPv4 is going.
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