It's ridiculous that it took Google so long to implement such a basic feature on their phones.
I just don't answer the call. If I don't know who you are, and you can't be bothered to leave a message … why should I care?
Empirically, half of upstate New York seems to think my number is the one they're looking for. Back before I stopped answering calls, I had to repeatedly tell one unknown number over SMS that this wasn't the number they were looking for. Over SMS. I hope that that number didn't have a smartphone, as my reply of "This isn't the number you're looking for." would quite probably have been right there on the screen as he typed in the next message, again to the wrong number.
I actually have a few of the more common wrong numbers in my contacts list, and some of them still call regularly. (Never leaving a message.)
Just a few months back someone called me on the morning train and told me they had my debit card that I had forgotten in the vending machine.
This summer I have tipped of a couple of parents about their kids belongings because I found their phone numbers on the stuff and they didn't block me. In one case it was a rather expensive outdoors jacket forgotten by the sea that they had been searching for to no avail.
Well that's just silly. If you don't recognise the number, don't answer it.
If it's someone you know, and it's important, they'll leave a message and you can call them back. If it's someone you don't know, and they leave a nuisance message, block them.
I've never understood people doing this. Why not just answer the phone? It takes 1 second to realize its spam, and you hang up, without risking ignoring your friend or a new doctor's office, and without touching voicemail. I don't like getting these calls either, but 90% of the damage is interrupting what I'm doing, getting out the phone, and looking at the screen.
I can only imagine that for some people there is some sort of visceral unpleasantness with hanging up on telemarketers or something and they'd rather ignore the call.
* If it's a withheld/private number, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I don't recognise, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from work/a client, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from a friend, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from a direct relative, I don't answer.
* If it's a number I recognise from a very direct relative and I've been called several times in the last minutes, I start pondering if I should pick it up or not. I usually do not, but ymmv
Do other phone vendors do this?
How is this basic? At a minimum it requires a database of spam numbers, a way to automatically add new ones, probably some way to deprecate numbers that are no longer spammy, a UI, and I'm sure some legal work to ensure they won't break any laws.
Another feature, which makes me facepalm in Google dialer is inability to block a spoofed number. If the phone number, which just called you, does not match some rules you get "Invalid phone number" pop up when choosing to block it.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way; I just find it useful.
I haven't given them access to my contacts yet though so I end up looking up numbers in the app. Loathe to give this information to yet another vendor yet back when I joined WhatsApp I didn't even consider the privacy implication. Illustrates the heightened awareness of privacy we have now.
we recently had an election here and the amount of spam calls from candidate campaigners and election polls was crazy. truecaller saved me! (I also go to report the ones that fell through)
I'm trying to sell them shit before they have a chance to finish their pitch. Or I hang up on myself (hangup when I'm speaking) and see how many times they call me back (current record is at 4 before the guy figured it out). Or pretend that I don't own a phone while on a phonecall with them. Or ask them for their personal cell number so I can call during lunch and discuss this.
BTW Randy Pausch gets credit for most of those.
It'd be cheaper to use a service like Jolly Roger to keep them busy:
At least they've done it. I haven't heard a peep about this functionality coming to the iPhone.
Right now with Google Voice I get a dozen hang up calls per day, it's always from a different number. When I don't answer, Ive got a dozen 2 second long voice mails. I used to spend a lot of time setting these to spam or being blocked, but between Google Voice and Hangouts simply asinine and beyond incompetent integration where some calls show up in Google Voice but not Hangouts and vice versa, I'm losing interest.
So recently I just decided to make the default behavior for the Google Voice number not ring any of my phones or Hangouts, but set up contact groups where friends and family should ring through. Well that's not working, I'm still getting spam and hangup calls, and some friends ring through, others don't, and client calls don't.
It's really craptastic.
It's probably part of the Dialler app, which many other manufacturers replace with their own application.
But you can download the Nexus dialer from the Play Store now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
That said they should charge me for more features! If it had pro features that worked for $35/year I'd do it.
I'd pay $35 a year for the f'n basic features it has now to work as they should, but don't. I'd pay a one time fee of $35 to see Hangouts die a fast death.
I have exactly this problem too and I have no idea where they are coming from. I'm constantly waking up to 1 or 2 empty 2 second voicemails from random numbers. Sometimes a single number does it 2 or 3 times. I guess I an turn off voicemail, that is probably the only reasonable fix.
My Google Voice, luckily, didn't have that problem (Grand Central era) - but my new T-Mobile Cell phone number gets tonnes of crap calls.
Although the gv voice prompt "state your name" seems to help immensely.
If that is the case, I wonder why that is!
I'm not sure what happened, but lately they've been rare (I suspect there's a lot of pressure on voip providers to up their game and stop selling to scammers), but in 2015 I had one or two per day, easy. These people often faked caller-id and had different numbers each time. It was difficult to block, so I just stopped answering calls I didn't recognize.
Worse, if you answered and treated them civilly like "No thank you I'm not interested in this please remove my number," they just hang up on you and then you get a new call from a different agent an hour later reading the exact same script.
The callers were obviously Indian call centers using scratchy sounding voip connections usually pretending to be your insurance company and asking for personal information or trying to sell you no-name car insurance.
No problems with a UK mobile number while I lived there. Seems like mostly landlines are affected there?
As Murphy's law would have had it, got my first spam SMS after posting this. THEY ARE WATCHING US.
If you threaten them with reporting to the TPS (Telephone preference service) and they're not just a robot, they sometimes stop bothering you.
As far as I know, numbers aren't recycled, so maybe the number is in such an old range that spammers don't bother calling it. I'm careful about who I give the number to, but I do share it.
My uncle was an early supporter of Ooma and my parents have a box that provides their landline number that they've had for 25+ years, and they don't pay anything in terms of a monthly fee.
In spite of how great of a deal it is, the spam calls have gotten to be so bad that my parents are considering getting rid of it. It's not worth the hassle, even when it's essentially free. At least half the calls that come in are spam.
(Quick aside: Ooma deserves praise for their product. I hope they succeed and can pivot properly to other products as telephones naturally die. They contribute back to the FOSS Asterisk project and their products are reliable.
Here's a cool blog post I've come across where someone hooks their Ooma box into a local server running Asterisk. You could probably do some really cool home-automation with this: http://www.adrianandgenese.com/blogger/2010/04/23/how-to-set... )
Most of the calls are from "one way funding" and "this is shelly, your local yahoo and google listings specialist."
I've had a Google (Voice) number for... hard to even say now, 8 years? And i.. well, i think i've only gotten a few calls to that number, ever.
In fact, i have a normal cell number (i don't link my google and cell provider numbers), and i get texted spam to it maybe twice a year, but i can't recall anything really.. ever, to my Google number.
To my knowledge i don't have any anti-spam settings enabled on Google Voice (though, they do exist). I wonder what the root cause for this is?
I often forget that "in this day and age", call spam is still an issue.
I don't get talking on the phone. It's the lowest quality form of communication - it's ephemeral, and unlike actual face-to-face communications, all nuance and body language goes out the window. Not to mention the all-too-often piss-poor audio quality, mics that don't work half the time, and the "Can you hear me now? What was the last thing you heard?" and "Sorry, I was on mute" dances.
Texting is fine for discrete, concrete information conveyance or things that don't require an immediate response. Sometimes dragging out a low-priority conversation via text is fine, but it can also be a time sink.
And while you may lose body language, you still have all the nuance of vocal inflection in voice that is lost in text.
Besides, when I need to talk to a client, it's almost always faster and easier for me to make a call. 5 minutes of talking can easily bypass 15-20 minutes of writing an email.
If it's taking too long to type, my suggestion would be to get better at typing, or distill out the wheat from the chaff of what you're trying to say. That's what really drives me up the wall with speech - the information density is typically incredibly low, and too often people let noises tumble out of their face-holes without trying to piece together a coherent thought. I realize that's harsh, but I've lost patience for rambling, stream-of-conscience external monologues. Which promptly dissolve back into the hot air from whence they came, since there is not a readily reviewable, indexed, searchable record created automatically in the process of such bloviation.
So there you go. Money making good people do bad things again.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6665847-daemon?from_sear...
Google's implementation also warns you about potential spam callers. Google maintains a list of spam callers and you can report phone numbers to this list.
Is this feature going to send all my incoming phone call numbers to Google - to compare it against a list of "known/suspected spammers"?
Will this only work in the United States or will it work internationally?
The feature has been available for a long time and is fantastic in my opinion. When an unknown number dials it gets replaced on the screen in ~1-2 seconds with the business name, which is really useful.
I wonder if Google is doing anything beyond simply crowdsourcing spam reports based on CallerID, at least for Google Voice numbers since they own that network so may have access to some data (ANI?) that's not normally available on regular phone lines?
And are political calls and surveys considered spam? I certainly consider them spam.
Maybe not for everyone. Yet.
But where a phone was for a time a liberating device, it's become what many of its early (and I'm talking about late 19c and early 20c critics said, not late 20/early 21) critics claimed: an insistant, rude, inconsiderate, and noxious nuisance.
A phone can ring at any time, from a call initiated anywhere in the world. Low (or zero) costs mean the caller has very little reason not to call, and even a very slight probability of a positive financial return can support all measure of spam.
The fact that carrying a phone subjects you to sub-minute location tracking, puts an always-on microphone in your pocket, and leaks your identity, location, habits, and interests to the highest bidder (or marginally competent hacker) makes that a non-starter.
For the past several years, I've simply not carried a phone when I could possibly manage to, and the liberation is tremendous. (The trauma of having been on-call for years may or may not have contributed to my intense distaste for the devices.)
There are other options -- virtually any modern electronic kit has multiple messaging capabilities, from email to IRC to various messaging applications to full VOIP and voice/video messaging. Carrying a non-phone Android tablet affords some utility without the tremendous disutilities of a phone.
But, and this speaks to recent pain, the device (a Samsung Tab A 9.7" WiFi-only) is itself locked down -- not rootable, bootloader locked, and so far as I can tell, no CyanogenMod images available for it. I'd bought it whilst travelling under some duress, as an affordable and, so far as I could tell, least-bad option.
But without the ability to actually control the system, I'm still subject to spam, crud, poor management tools (simply being able to allocate and manage storage rationally appears beyonds its meagre capabilities), etc.
What Google are offering is very little, very late. And the fact that other telcos are failing to step up and address the massive disutilities of their projects is another immense failing of the market. Realising these are the same unspeakable idiots who'll be shoving Internet of Shit devices down our every orifice makes me cry for the future.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/relea...
> CallKit. CallKit also introduces app extensions that enable call blocking and caller identification. You can create an app extension that can associate a phone number with a name or tell the system when a number should be blocked.
