Simple Things We Will Never Have

[fhm555]

hey folks.
As my phone rings for the third time today showing another fake caller ID playing another recorded message telling me not to hang up, i think about how easy it would be to stop all that BS.
Instead of allowing us to block numbers, allow us to add numbers we want to hear from. Any number we don’t want to hear from, don’t add it. A reverse call block, a cool caller list.
To mollify the hall monitors, require four numbers to be added to every personal phone in America, one for local LE, One for county LE, one for state LE, and one for federal LE. Make these automatic add and drop off as you cross jurisdictional lines so you are always in touch with the relevent authorities. Anyone else want to talk to you it’s up to you to enter their digits in your phone.
All incoming comm besides those four lines should be up to the owner of the device.
Instead we have apps that pick songs for us based on what BBQ sauce we used last month.

 

[Alkali Ike]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, what you're describing is fairly easy to do on iOS. By using the Notifications and Do Not Disturb features, the phone can be made to only put through calls from people in your Contacts.

Invalid Link Removed

 

[Stumbo]

I get pretty much near zero spam calls.

Whenever a live person gets through, I thank them for calling and ask to be taken off their call list.

Otherwise call block works as advertised.

I do answer calls because sone if my vendors use 800 or other toll free type services. I add those to my contacts.

It took a bit of work and time but now I'm pretty much set to have a spam free phone.

 

[two fingers]

The problem is on the other end. Those companies calling you can literally display whatever they want in the caller ID field. That's how they've been able to pluck local numbers from your area amd display them on your phone when it rings.

I got a call recently and ignored. They called back three other times and I finally answered "What?????" They went off on me saying I had just called them and woke them from a nap.

I had to explain that I had not called them and could show them on my phone.... or am itemized bill.... or whatever. They still didn't believe me.

 

[MJ5150]

I set my Android device to only accept calls from my contacts. Spam calls and texts are zero.
For fun, and after reading an article predicting 50% or more of calls to mobile phones would be spam in the near future, I turned that setting off for a few days. Sure enough, I got my share of spam calls during that time.

-Mike

 

[Alkali Ike]

The mystery to me is how it’s apparently so easy to spoof caller ID. I guess it wasn’t on the radar of telecom engineers 50 years ago.

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

The mystery to me is how it’s apparently so easy to spoof caller ID. I guess it wasn’t on the radar of telecom engineers 50 years ago.

That’s the problem. 50 years ago all we used our phones for were to make phone calls.
Now, that’s just one of a million uses for the thing we use to call the grandkids.

We had to memorize everyone’s phone number who we called regularly, and we had to spin a big dial with finger holes to dial a number. No area codes, no star-pound, no menus. Caller ID was barely on the radar, let alone the concept of making the number on the ID look like a different number.
Was your life less complicated then?

 

[fdeck]

My rule is: If it's important they'll leave a message.

I'm just going to set things up so that my default ringtone is one thing, and my friends get a different ringtone. That seems easy enough to do in Android. Then I will ignore the default ringtone.

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

My rule is: If it's important they'll leave a message.

I'm just going to set things up so that my default ringtone is one thing, and my friends get a different ringtone. That seems easy enough to do in Android. Then I will ignore the default ringtone.

Me too.
If you want to talk to me, you gotta talk to the machine.

Did you get my message?

 

[rufus.K]

I've had good results adding numbers to my block list