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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

I tried it, and within a week I missed an important call. I was waiting by the phone, and it just never arrived. I realized too late that it had been silenced. It's very frustrating that we can't just get something like a spam filter, rather than a blanket "silence everything unknown."

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Yeah part of the problem is there are tons of legitimate businesses out there that will do important things only over the phone, from obviously an unknown number, where if you miss the call it becomes a big hassle to get back in touch with them. Happens with banks and other financial institutions, doctors offices, deliveries and all kinds of other services.

It would kind of solve the problem if a norm emerged that these types of companies first send a confirmation email with the phone number they'll be calling from so you can add it to your caller id. But it's a lot of extra work for people and I think it's probably asking too much of the average non technical user.

Even better, why couldn't we have something like SSL certificates or DKIM for phone calls? People for the most part understand the lock icon and a verified flag in a user interface. Then a call could be signed to know that it's coming from a particular entity.

It seems like some other countries have solved this problem by moving away from regular sms and phone calls and instead letting a private company own all communication, like WeChat in China. Which obviously is quite problematic in other ways, but honestly at this point that would be an improvement in my opinion, if businesses started only contacting me through Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp so I could see who every message is associated with.

Business opportunity.

I agree there’s a business here, but will walled gardens let the solution work optimally? Apple locks down their phone and messaging apis so that nobody can use them.

Basically: selling the ability for a company to make phone calls from numerous systems all of which appear to originate at a single, designated, known, and generally callee-approved, number.

Needn't be a walled garden.

Though migrations from PSTN to various alternatives is also fairly likely. Much of the present "social media" / apps space is actually probably a jostling for supremacy / positioning in this regard.

I was working on a system like this years ago. I called it choicelist, and submitted a paper to the FTC spam forum.

It was a user configurable white list solution in which an entity can specify all the ways they may contact you (numbers, addresses, and optionally signing or encryption public keys), and you can white list the organization as a whole.

Messages purporting to come from one of these organizations that fails the self specified check can be safely ignored.

At the time, blockchains didn't exist, and the missing piece of the puzzle was a distributed database not controlled by any central organization.

T-Mobile does spam filtering; not sure about other carriers. The default configuration (or at least I think it is, because I don't remember changing it) is to tag the calls by setting the Caller-ID to the name "Scam Likely". You can then configure your phone to respond differently to calls from that ID (e.g. disable ringer). Alternately, if you trust their filtering enough, you can have those calls blocked so they don't ring through to the phone at all. I think it's been working fairly well for me, but I also rarely get legitimate calls from anyone other than a handful of friends/family who are in my contacts list, so I can't be too sure of the false-positive rate.

Info: https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-38784

Unfortunately when I use our conference system’s “call my phone” feature it almost always shows the number as “scam likely”. So I guess the scammers are using the same block of numbers as the conference system.

Is your outbound system spoofing a number so they all appear to be from the same one? If so, that might be why.

I updated to the beta specifically for this feature. But, like anything else like this, was worried missing important calls. I get a notification immediately about a missed call (which I'll probably soon try and turn off), I'm a lot more aggressive about adding businesses to my address book (someone else said they whitelist phone numbers you've made calls to even if they're not in your address book), and I kind of expect important calls to leave a voicemail.

iOS also has a call blocking and identification interface apps can hook into. I haven't found a good spam call blocker app though.

Try Nomorobo - took robocalls down by at least 90% for me, and I gladly pay ~$20US / year to not have flow interrupts. Works on iOS, free for VOIP numbers.

You don’t have voicemail setup?

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