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A specific practical objection to modern blocking culture (self.technology)

submitted 4 months ago by sparr to c/technology

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Android prompts me to "Block and Report Spam" for spam phone calls, in both the Phone app for regular phone calls and the Voice app for calls through Google Voice.

There is no way to report spam in either app without blocking the number.

Spammers and scammers change their phone numbers frequently. Daily or more, in the case of sophisticated large operations. Those numbers get reassigned to innocent users, who will forever be blocked from calling me.

"Dumb" phone number blocks should only last for maybe a month or a year, not forever. And we should have "smart" blocks, that sync to phone number registration databases and expire when the number changes hands.

This is going to become an increasingly impactful problem if we keep using phone numbers as identifiers while most phone number users don't keep the same number for decades.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Yeah, I've had my number reported as spam before from someone impersonating my number, and I've run into several customers through work whose numbers had been reported as spam as well. I've also gotten calls from people who supposedly missed a call from me, that I had never called before. Most likely they missed a spam call that was impersonating my number.

Thankfully it wasn't too hard to get off of the spam call registries, and you can even preemptively register your number with them as a non-spam number to try to avoid getting caught in this. But it's still frustrating to have to deal with this at all, and it's far too difficult to realize your phone number has been flagged as spam. The people you frequently talk to probably have you added as a contact and will never get a chance to see you've been flagged as spam. And if you call anyone new, they probably won't answer your call because it shows up as spam. End result is you just have trouble getting in touch with people you haven't already swapped contacts with, and never get a good chance to learn why.