Alexa Calling doesn’t allow any numbers in the phone’s contacts to be blocked | Hacker News Reader

Alexa Calling doesn’t allow any numbers in the phone’s contacts to be blocked

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58 pointsTerretta49 comments

> I was particularly excited for the feeling of a “home phone” ... every contact that also has the Alexa app is now in my Alexa Calling contacts. Among my contacts were old landlords, many co-workers, random vendor account managers, city councilmen, and of course, crazy ex-boyfriends. And each one now has a direct line into my home.

This is of course how the old "home phone" worked, and there was even a book sent to every house that listed the "direct line into the home" of everybody else.

But modern phones don't work that way - if I don't want my boss or my crazy ex to call me, I can set their number not to ring my phone. There is apparently no way to do that with the Alexa app.

There are very few people that I actually want to get calls from.

>There is apparently no way to do that with the Alexa app.

But certainly it's not impossible for this to be fixed.

The Alexa documentation says

> Alexa will let you know when someone is calling, and a green light ring will appear on your supported Echo device. You can ask Alexa to answer or ignore the call.

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16713667011

That's similar to a phone, isn't it? This blogpost doesn't seem to have articulated the problem very well.

Is it contacting each of the contacts in some way or adding it to a directory?

My experience with imported address books is that the service importing them will often add or update contact channels. For example, if someone has changed their phone number and the service has that person's new phone number in its database, the new number is available for contacting that person. Email can be similar. And of course new channels are added.

WhatsApp doesn't do this, which I found out when I changed my number. At first I thought it's dumb, but later I realized, it's actually good, because what if I'm running away from an abusive partner. I get a new number, change my WA number, an boom, that partner gets notified that I changed my number.

I wish there's an option WhatsApp can send "netsharc has a new number" notification to people I can select out of my address book.

Having a publicly known thing that also has to be kept private from some people seems like it's the root cause of the problems. It's like having a single shared password to keep an important resource safe.

No, it's like having an important resource, period. You have a piece of information that you want some people to have but not others. This is a simple (though not necessarily easy) problem, which happens to get harder as the set of people who you do want to have the information gets larger.

Note that you also don't want this to be publicly known - letting random people find your phone number is also considered a Bad Thing.

It's a default thing though. Home landlines are publicly listed unless you pay monthly to unlist.

Thankfully, that is not the default for cell phones, which most people have instead of landlines.

Do you know anyone with an actual landline? My parents and my parents-in-law both have VoIP over DSL, and they're the only ones I know with "home" phones at all.

But there doesn't seem to be a way to silently block calls. I'm pretty sure on Android or iPhone I can blacklist numbers, so I would not even get a notification that the number tried to call me. If the device says "Call from $CRAZY_EX, do you want to answer?", you'd feel terrorized. Of course the solution would be to unplug the device.

It's pathetic that "We will take your whole address book, and tell everyone on it, that you're contactable here." is the default nowadays, that even "secure" alternatives are doing it, e.g. www.jwz.org/blog/2017/03/signal-leaks-your-phone-number-to-everyone-in-your-contacts/ (jwz hates HN so copy-paste this link...).

That blog post seems unjustified.

Quote from one of the comments: "If I understand what Moxie said earlier, the way this actually works is: every single Signal user periodically says to the Signal server, "here are (hashes of) all of the phone numbers in my contacts, which of these are registered with Signal?" Same effect, different mechanism."

It's not the case that everyone is told.

I recently had to read that post by moxie to try and implement secure contact discovery in my app. Here it is: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

Really interesting read, thanks! What did you use in the end?

It's for a side-project with few users and I still have to take that decision. I am too scared to just upload (and store) user contacts on my end. That's a huge responsibility IMO.

Most if not all phone providers give you a way to block specific numbers from even reaching your device. They're usually buried in horrendous web interfaces, but they're there.

Seems like something that was probably just overlooked, or pushed out to post-launch because deadlines.

I just add the number to the contacts list and set the ring tone to silent and no vibration. Eventually I'll notice a missed call but the name I gave the contact will tell me straight away that I don't need to look further.

No because some calls you want to route to /dev/null and there doesn't seem to be any caller ID in Alexa

The WhatsApp/Signal/Alexa anti-pattern of "Let's mine all the numbers in your phonebook and tell them your business" is exactly why you need to curate multiple profiles these days... My marketing profile has no personal contacts in it and vice versa.

I'm not sure I understand the appeal of Alexa or Alexa Calling, is there such a market for people taking calls from a speaker phone? When do people not just have their phone on them?

Is there proof that people are using Alexa for more than just showing their friends? I know this is an anecdote, but I know 3 people with Alexas and all 3 have them collecting dust. I just think in a way this new tech is largely hype. Microsoft released numbers on Cortana use and it appeared good...but how much of that was actually voice? Same with Siri, and Google Now.

The voice tech I see getting the most adoption right now (again an anecdote) is people controlling their TVs with their voices. Beit Cortana on Xbox, FireTV or Comcast's voice remote. I don't see much evidence in my own life of people using assistants like Alexa that only rely on voice. I see people showing them off to their friends and then forgetting they exist. In a way I would argue that Alexa if the digital assistants "Kinect moment."

Lying in bed, cooking, or just sitting down when you left your phone elsewhere. It's not that hard to imagine is it?

It's not hard to imagine. But "easy to imagine" does not equal "success".

Alexa wasn't a big sell to me before I looked at the home automation side of things. Alexa + Hue is pretty fantastic. Settled down for a movie "Alex, dim the lights." Or lying in bed. Or setting a program while on vacation. That plus hooking it up to spotify is pretty great. If you're cooking, "Alex next." etc. The classic "Alexa how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon" comes up from time to time as well. It's 100% a thing no one needs, but certainly has a use.

Or listening to the radio, I just say play NPR in the morning. And the skills are becoming more useful. Plus I like the Flash Briefing.

> When do people not just have their phone on them?

Even in modern Western society, not every human being has a mobile phone. Home phone lines have long been a way to reach the young children and the elderly/infirm in your family—that is, the human beings who rarely ever leave home unescorted—when you're out and they're not.

I'm super psyched. I use my Alexa all the time, I haven't tried calling out yet, but I have a use case in mind. I work from home, every morning I have a meeting. I rarely talk, but I still have to listen. Usually I do it on my phone in the kitchen while I boil some water for my french press. If I could do it on my echo with the better quality speaker. Life would be MUCH better. One step further, only downside is then it would mean that I'd have to stay in the kitchen until the meeting is over. If I could transfer from my phone and back, that would be nice.

I have an Alexa and use it daily. It doesn't see much use, but the uses I have for it are a minor extra convenience that is sufficient to justify it. E.g. setting reminders, playing music.

I'd rank it firmly as a luxury item, though - it's a replacement for spending 10 seconds looking for a remote/phone/laptop one of which is always nearby. But it's nice for that purpose. It's one of those things that lets the technology fade into the background.

It's one of things you want to be able to forget exists and use use now and again without thinking about it.

100-1 this was built by a bunch of young dudes. Get one female on the team, and she would have said: "uh, maybe we need a way to block people".

This is why we need better diversity in tech.

Privacy preferences aside, this is just a terribly under-specified feature. An inability to manage contacts or the feature itself is just embarrassing.

The title of this post is what the title of the article should be. The article is presuming that a feature as designed is a flaw. When articles throw FUD like that they lose credibility. Tell it like it is, and let people decide if they want to use it. And if people don't then it'll be up to the developers to give people something they will use.

The whole fear mongering really turned me off to the article. ("This could be used against domestic violence victims" etc)

Isn't this the same as FaceTime/iMessage and other messaging apps?

You know who on your contact list has an iPhone, WhatsApp etc.

There is definitely a "block" feature in WhatsApp (has had it for at least 5 years)

Is there one for FaceTime/IMessage? I never seen it and the FaceTime dial option is in my contacts for every contact that has an iPhone it seems to even update on its own since contacts that have migrated off or to Apple have been kept upto date.

Maybe I'm old but I'd love to get a call or a message from out of the blue. It's been a couple years since it happened and I miss random interaction.

I met one of my dearest longtime friends years ago in the late 90 while messaging people on AOL at random in their directory.

That sort of meeting people is dead.

I'm seriously considering getting a cheap Android phone just for Alexa. The requirement to give it access to all your contacts is absurd.

Have you considered voting with your wallet and not using the Alexa service?

Didn't have this problem with Alexa, it is willing to run most functions w/o blanket permissions.

Google Home, OTOH, will not. So I have a device in a drawer just for it. Enjoy your accelerometer data, Google...

For me, the most important features for a communication platform (aside from reliability) are the ability to block users and the ability to mute alerts from users.

It boggles my mind that this isn't universal, like people want to be interrupted.

You must not be that old. Telephones best feature was it put everyone on an equal footing. Anyone could call anyone else. The government levied a fee on all phones to make sure that everyone would have equal access to them. And we do. It's why it worked so well for so long. It stopped working well, when we added caller ID, and blocking. If you want to block someone it should be hard, and you should have a reason beyond being annoyed. We're becoming into a selfish society who are turning against each other. When we need to start turning towards each other and remembering the golden rule.

I'm old enough to remember running into the house from outside to pick up the phone before it stopped ringing, then having no idea who it was when I just missed the phone (since we had no answering machine or caller ID). That was not a feature that I would call "working well".

But now I have at least 5 ways to contact me that don't involve making my phone ring and interrupting whatever I'm doing to look at the phone and see if it's someone important enough to stop what I'm doing to talk to them. There are very few people that I actually want to receive calls from and I almost never answer the phone.

I'm 28 which is not that old admittedly, although perhaps older than the median startup employee. By the time I was fourteen I stopped answering my home phone because it was just telemarketers and I was fortunate enough to be an early cell phone user ( and mostly communicated with my friends via AIM).

I am not turning towards anyone. I want to choose who can contact me and when, because I like being able to sleep and do things without interruption. The fact that phone numbers can be hidden or falsified when initiating contact with me makes phone calls rather broken and is the main reason I haven't investigated an AdBlockPlus style phone filtering app to preemptively block telemarketers.

It is not selfish to want to live peacefully, it is selfish to demand the right to interrupt me.

Just wait like 3-6 months and they will release this feature

Does Alexa automatically answer the call?

It might be that it notifies those other users of your phone number when they might not know it. I.e. if you store a number of someone you don't want to speak to so you can decline their calls.

Supposing you did this for extra piece of mind, even though they don't have your number, it would suck if they end result would be you giving them your number.

Thanks. I was struggling to figure out how this was worse than normal cell calls - as the ability to block numbers is still mind-boggling rare.

That is definitely a problem.

I don't think there's any notification that someone has added you to their contact list. That is, if you have someone's phone number in your contact list, and they sign up for amazon calling, you see their name in a list. However, if they don't have your number already, they can't see you as a contact. The only information leaking is that someone can learn that you're still using the phone number they have for you and that you're using amazon calling. Contacts in amazon calling don't appear to be two way.

For now

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