Comment by bityard
1 year ago
I have a system that takes it one step further and both reduces the awkwardness and false-positive rate at the same time: I add the people that I know to the contacts on my phone. When a call comes in as a number instead of a name, I simply decline to pick it up. If it's not a spam call, they will either leave a voice message or send a text. If they do neither, then either it was a spam/scam call, or whatever they had to say probably wasn't that important in the first place. Win/win.
I've been doing this for a little over a decade and it hasn't let me down yet.
> and it hasn't let me down yet.
It's let me down a ton. Deliveries, contractors, maintenance people, doctor's offices with a last minute appointment available, and so forth. Fortunately never for a true emergency, but that's also something to keep in mind as well.
There are lots of things that people simply don't leave a voice mail or text because if they can't contact you immediately, there's no point. Or if the contractor can't get you on the phone, they'll just move onto the next home and skip work on yours that day or that whole week.
So it's not win/win. It's very much win/lose.
my strategy is to live in a different place than my area code and only pick up from number that do not share my area code. This is pretty clise to working but I did almost miss an instacart delivery because they happened to be from my home town.
> my strategy is to live in a different place than my area code and only pick up from number that do not share my area code. This is pretty clise to working but I did almost miss an instacart delivery because they happened to be from my home town.
I'm in that situation, and it works most but not all of the time.
I don't really keep track, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten robocalls with an area code appropriate to my city, either it was coincidence or they were using a database that had my actual location.
A good tactic I use is as stated + if you see a number you don't recognize is to answer and then put yourself on mute and wait. Typically robocalls just hang up after a few seconds of silence.
I struggle to do this cause it shows that the number is valid. Always leads to an increase in calls for me :(
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Call centers will dial multiple numbers and connect to only the ones where someone responds. Sometimes they will still hang up on you because multiple calls responded.
Probably a wash whatever you do after picking up.
I leave a simple voicemail message: please send me a text.
People that listen to that will... send a text.
It is sad that virtually every form of communication: snail mail, phone, email is overridden with spam and fraud, and the "FCC" does jack about it except a CYA "hey we said it was wrong".
The FCC has been so thoroughly lost to regulatory capture and licentious industry - lobbying - official revolving door that it possibly the least effective federal regulatory agency, and that is saying something
I don't think my doctor's office can even send texts. They just have landlines.
Same with restaurants calling about a reservation opening up. Etc.
Not to mention the fact that if someone doesn't intend to leave a voicemail, they'll often/usually hang up as soon as the prerecorded message starts. "Hi, you've reached" -- <click>.
Those sound like cases where you would have heightened expectation of an important anonymous call. If that's not the case, and you must always maintain a high expectation of an important anonymous call, then I don't know what you can do. I guess that's how the telephone was, say, 70 years ago.
This worked for us until we owned a house. Now, we get calls from random numbers multiple times a week, and if we don't answer, the house falls down or something.
For deliveries, if they have tracking (which most of them has) I'm expecting an unknown number, so when I pick up 99% of the time it's the delivery person.
For the rest, unless its an appointment that requires me picking up the phone ASAP (which is maybe once or twice a year for me), they leave a message and I just call back.
In France, we have a gouv service to block non-solicited phone commercial calls. It works pretty well. Combined with the default google spam blocker, most of the phone calls I receive are phone calls I want.
You’re correct. One suggestion is explicitly request email or text instead of calling. (Or WhatsApp in many countries.) Since some people are hearing-impaired, it’s not even an unusual request even before this spam program arose.
It won’t always work, e.g. the request won’t reach the delivery driver who’s a contractor of the subcontractor of the logistics company you mention this to. However, I’ve found it works with businesses that are small enough to care about customer satisfaction.
Add the contractor to your contacts.
This is a specific example of what should be a much more general practice: having separate protocols for establishing an initial contact and establishing a communications session with an already existing contact. My email spam filter is based on this. It does a first-stage separation between email from people I've corresponded with in the past and everything else. That simple heuristic is enough to achieve >99% accuracy all by itself.
Stepping back a bit, I find it kind of strange that knowledge of a 7-digit number is all that's required for anyone in the world to (by default) immediately interrupt someone.
Here's a thought. If the concept of a phone was never invented, and nobody knew what one was, and then suddenly here in 2024, an app company invented an app where:
- The user could type in a N digit number and hit a button...
- This would cause another user's device to instantly stop doing what it was doing. ring and buzz with a modal popup window...
- With no authentication whatsoever or often even no identification...
- And then if that other user pushed a button, it allowed the initial user to be able to instantly start sending them voice
This thing would never make it past any app store's guidelines, and would likely be unacceptable to users. It's intrusive, invasive, and practically invites abuse and spam. Yet, since The Phone is an actual historic invention that goes back decades, it's culturally acceptable for I guess legacy reasons.
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In the prehistoric era (and continuing into the present day), all that's required to interrupt someone is a set of vocal chords you can use to talk to them, or a finger you can use to tap them on the shoulder, or a fist you can use to knock on their door. The universe isn't naturally shaped in a way that makes interrupting difficult, and never has been.
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That's a local phone number in the US. It's 10 digits nationally. More internationally.
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Interesting point. 7 digits was in part chosen because people used to have to remember phone numbers.
So.. add a few digits and suddenly spammers would have trouble.
On the hand, add a few digits to phone numbers and Y2K might look like a walk in the park.
I navel-gaze that if we redesigned communications from the ground up we could handle this better. When you greet someone physically you can add each other as known trusted contacts immediately. And when you sign up to some service online and have to put in your contact info, which likewise prompts you to add them as contact. And you can't share along a contact you know to someone else without that contact ID uniquely identifying you.
That way, everyone who should contact you can do so and if someone else gets their hand on your contact info you can figure out who leaked it.
I do this with my email. I have a bunch of different emails under my own domain, and I use info+uniqueidentifier@domain.org for registrations which do not warrant their own actual email handle.
This way, I can easily filter incoming email, and I can see where an email came from if any party sells my data.
This also works with GMail by the way, you can use youraccount+anyrandomstring@gmail.com and emails will still be delivered to you.
I use a separate email handle that I only hand out to actual human beings, never to companies and never use for account registrations.
This has worked really well for the past 15 years or so.
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I've though a little bit about what a good successor to email would look like, and in addition to things like native support for encryption and authentication, one of the big features I wanted was to put not allow sending a message unless the recipient had added you to their list of contacts. And maybe have a way to to send a request that someone add you to their contacts, that would be processed differently than a normal message.
That eliminates a huge class of genuinely useful use cases for email.
Part of the usefulness is that you can write and receive to addresses without prior permission.
I've had wonderful conversations with authors, academics, politicians and other strangers around the world thanks to the permissive ability of email.
That's my approach as well, but I had the same number calling me for 3 weeks and I finally answered. It was my electric company, something had gone wrong with a payment.
They have my email address, they send me txts all the time, but apparently collections is still making phone calls. Had to be the dumbest thing I'd seen. Once I answered and found out the issue, I paid the bill properly, but I wonder how far it would have gone before they cut off my power, while they kept sending me emails and txts about things that have nothing to do with my bill.
For some places their internal processes require positive contact with the account holder, in other words they can't trust that an email or text will be read (or read by the account holder). They definitely should've tried at least once though, especially if you opted for that as your primary communication method.
That seems strange to me.
I mean: I think it is perfectly OK to have a policy that requires real people to make real phone calls for some things -- especially things that might not fit into automated systems.
But I think it's very bizarre that these real people would not also leave a voicemail message stating the purpose of the call.
(There's tons of reasons for people to not answer the phone that extend beyond screening unknown numbers.
Like: I might be happy to answer the phone for a strange number but I'm crawling around under my car and my hands are covered in greasy road funk. Or I'm with a client. Or I'm at work and my boss is an overbearing prick. Or...)
I've had a disturbingly large number of repeat calls from people who absolutely refuse to leave a message. And it's always some recruiter who saw an opening on indeed or somewhere and thinks the resume I updated 5 years ago is a good match.
The problem is that if I'm getting repeated calls from an unrecognized number, I'm assuming my wife, my kids, or my parents are in an ambulance, so I have to drop everything and answer.
As a rule of thumb, if I get a one-off call that doesn't leave a message, I'll search my email inbox for that number, as they've probably contacted me separately. However, one time, I got called 5 times in 90 minutes, with the only message being 23 seconds of silence, and an email I hadn't even read yet (searching the number brought up the email). I sent an angry email that amounted to "you have told me how you AND YOUR CLIENTS treat prospective employees' time. I will never apply to any job you suggest, even independently of you. Stop calling"
Many of us are in situations where we get calls from various people we haven't had contact before (nurse at the child's school, parent's doctor, there's a lot of them) that should be answered immediately; waiting until later to listen to the message could have significant impacts. Some of the calls (injured child) could require immediate contact and, if not answered, could result in other issues.
My area code doesn't match my area, and most e.g. recruiters are calling from other area codes as well, so I can be reasonably confident that a local-area-code call is legitimate, but man is it frustrating to brace myself for "$child/$spouse/$etc is on their way to $hospital..." and instead I get "I was very impressed by your skills I got from $someJobBoardIHaven'tUsedInYears, are you free to talk about a $industryOrCareerFieldIDon'tWorkIn position located in $areaIHaven'tLivedInInYears?"* Especially if they've called repeatedly in a short amount of time without leaving a message.
*bonus if they're speaking heavily accented english and miss important connecting words, suggesting they don't even really understand the script they're reading from, much less the job description they just pulled off of Indeed or wherever.
Area codes are increasingly meaningless as people A: drop land lines and B: Keep porting the same cell number around (for obvious reasons).
Really what's needed it ditching numbers, at least as user facing things, and having something like phone-over-dns.
Yeah, when you have small children, your obligation to pick up the phone when they aren't with you is increased. I also find that whenever you're shopping for big-ticket items that involve salespeople and soliciting multiple bids, you have to forego your "don't pick up the phone for unknown numbers" policy.
I now just pick up and say "hello?" and count off two seconds. If I don't hear a response within that time I hang up. I've had a couple false positives, but they generally just assume there was a dropped call and try again.
I pick up and don't say anything. Humans typically, after about 4 seconds, go "umm.. hello?" and I have a conversation with them, while bots simply hang up.
Wow, everyone's imaginations sure ran wild with this.
Yes, I use common sense and DO pick up calls from unknown numbers when I am expecting them. Most days, I am not expecting them.
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Newer versions of Android and iOS allow you to immediately send a call to voicemail and then watch the live transcription
If it’s important, the caller will generally start leaving a message, and you can pick up right there
One way might be to list a number that you monitor as their "emergency contact" but list a virtual or other no-pick-up-policy number for all other forms.
The only issue is that a friend once listed me as their emergency contact for a gym membership, but then the gym made telemarketing calls to me with it. There should be federal law protecting emergency contact numbers from being shared or used for any reason except an emergency.
Alternative method might be to set up a Twilio workflow that says "Press 1 to reach me" and only forward to your actual phone after that. That will probably eliminate all the robocallers but not the human telemarketers
I have children. And I didn't say I wait until later to listen to the message.
I can't think of any non-action-movie scenarios where me picking up the phone within a specific 120 second window would be a life-or-death situation. If there are any, they are so unlikely that they are not even remotely worth being annoyed by multiple scam calls a day.
This 100%. iPhones have a feature to do this automatically. It doesn’t even ring, and goes straight to voicemail if they’re not in your contacts. It’s so freeing!
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111106
How do you deal with deliveries from DHL and similar?
Everytime I buy something from an eshop I have to start taking calls around the delivery date.
Also it would be a bit annoying (and risky!) to have to remember to turn it on and off again any time I order food.
I was waiting by the door for an Amazon package recently that was out for delivery and I got a phone call from an unknown number. I answered it and the guy said "Hi, I'm calling from Amazon delivery." and they almost had me. He then said some bullshit about needing me to log into some random URL and a laughed and hung up on him.
The timing was essential, though.
That's relatively uncommon in the US, except for food and other perishables. Although often they text. But the people I know who order food and silence their phone normally are glued to the tracking page in the app anyway.
I have cameras and and a smart doorbell so I know if someone is at the door. This plus in-app notifications handles food delivery for me.
You can also set up a shortcut to toggle the setting. There’s been a couple times when waiting for a callback where I turn the setting off. Then when I get the call I switch it back.
Ultimately, for me, the pros far outweigh the cons. But you have to make the decision for yourself.
Then I get complaints from doctors that they are being shoved directly to voice mail, because they somehow have 8 different numbers to log.
Thank you for mentioning this. It was news to me
One major flaw in this, at least for me: Dr's offices. They love to dial from a gazillion random numbers, and for privacy reasons they often leave no message or a very vague and concerning "Call us when you get this" sort of thing.
Ugh, and then you call the number and it takes you to an IVR menu where the only options are “billing” and “surgery” or other some such. I’ve had doctors call me with results and the only way I could get ahold of them was to call, pretend I had a billing issue to get to some human, then try to convince them to connect me to the person who just called me not 5 minutes ago.
Yes. The office that I am with just leaves a message saying to call them back. I am always happy to.
I have a different system. I pick up the phone, listen to them for a bit, tell them "please wait while I get my credit card number", and then I just walk away with the connection still open.
It's great when it works, but when my mom was in the hospital and they needed to reach me, I got burned by this big time and don't do it anymore. It's too easy to miss a call that could literally be life and death (my mom is better now).
This is an example of the Trust On First Use policy, like when you SSH to a machine whose cert you don't have and you are invited to trust it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use
And the entire "Hang up, look up, call back" is just a trapdoor firewall. From a 10,000-foot perspective, humans and computers are the same, they're just nodes that communicate information.
Man I think about this all the time. We have robots calling humans and robots answering calls to verify the other end isn't a robot. We just need to connect the dots and have the robots talk to the robots and collate the important bits for the humans. English becomes a fuzzy "API" for the robots to communicate with each other. I get weirded out when I think about it.
I do exactly this but take it even one step further. My actual (primary) phone number is only ever given out to humans. I have a second Google Voice phone number that I give out to machines (e.g. online shopping that "requires" a phone number that will eventually be leaked).
What happens when one of the people to whom you gave your number shares their contacts with some app?
This is why I use a numeric pager, digits handed out to both machines and humans.
I call back from an unlisted number. Few people have my actual phone #.
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If people are persistant, I usually mention something to the effect of "you don't want my phone number in your device, I know some weird people."
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The first time I used Venmo, was also my last — the "feature" which show you every person who has your phone number in their phonebook was a bit too weird [the idea of public payments also strange].
I have a child, he has a phone but his battery might go empty, or the phone is lost or broken, he has my number written down and I instruct him to call me from a colleague or a stranger. Maybe my case is special since my son has some health issues so I really want to know immediately if something happened.
This kind of problem needs to be solved at the root cause, say if the phone companies could be made to pay a bit when you get spammed and forced to recover their costs from the spammers the issue would be solved, now if they profit the issue will get larger and alrger.
For this type of case it would be ideal if you could give him a passcode.
Couldn't be too difficult to set up a "unknown number" redirect that prompts for a pin, then forwards to a live line if correct.
This is adding more complexity. The solution is super simple, you should be able to report the number as spam, if a few other people report the number then the phone company will block the number and the phone company will have to pay the customers affected a small sum. You will immediately see the phone companies putting the work for detecting mass spammers, making sure that businesses that do mass calls have deposits for the case they abuse the system etc.
This method unfortunately falls apart if you get a phone call from a hospital. They'll leave you a voice message, but when you call the same number back you'll get the front desk instead of the doctor who left you the message. They'll patch you through to the ward your Dad's in, but they won't be able to give out any information over the phone, so you'll need to wait for the doctor to call you back. They're out doing their rounds at the moment, but they'll get back to you as soon as they can.
I do the same, but even the legitimate callers never seem to leave a voicemail or send a text message.
I have missed deliveries or other important things due to my policy.
Yup, same. I'll make an exception if I'm expecting an important call but aren't sure of what number it's going to come from. This is rare enough that it doesn't bother me much. And now that some calls are SHAKEN/STIR-verified, with a caller ID, I can often have good confidence before I pick up that it's actually the call I'm waiting for.
Imagine all of the unnecessary insurance and “Google tech support” you’re missing out on purchasing.
I do this too, but I also remember that I'm doing this from a situation of privilege, where I mostly don't have to wait for calls that could be life changing (ex: old-school HR calling back for a new job).
On Pixel phones (or was it Google Fi? can't remember), this is automatic. If it's not someone in my contact list already, known spam gets auto blocked and everyone else gets redirects to the voice assistant that takes a message and transcribes it. Cuts down on spam like 99% for me.
I had an iPhone for a few months and the spam was so bad, even with the third party spam blockers. I switched back to Android shortly after.
100%
If the number isn’t in my contacts, it goes to voicemail.
I used to answer calls from local numbers, but I’ve started getting spam calls with my local area code now.
I do the same thing usually. If I do pick up an unknown number because I am expecting something, I usually press speaker and mute and just wait. If it's a person, I'll get an awkward Hello? And if it's an auto dialer usually I get nothing or the waterdrop beep and drop either way.
I do a thing where I answer and just dont say anything (ensuring my enviornment is silent) for like 20+ seconds.... they hang up and I block number. (The bot thinks its a dead num and I dont get calls again.
Spammers will spoof local numbers. I had my pharmacy call me only to find out it was a scam call that used spoofing.
This is also why you always call anyone you don’t know back on a listed number like the switchboard of the company they claim to be from if you think you need to engage with them
I've a somewhat uncommon area code (less than a million 307 numbers), so any time I get a call from a 307 number, I'm reasonably confident that its either a wrong number, or a spoofed number. In either case, I don't answer. Its quite a system.
I try to live this way, but people have become increasingly bad at actually leaving voicemails.
I wonder if this could be setup as a rule to go directly to voice mail if not in contacts.
Yes, this is available in iOS settings.
I've always wished that there was an option to whitelist certain area codes. I've had the same number for 20 years, and now live in a different part of the country. I get very little spam from local area codes -- but a ton spoofing my phone number's area code. Sending all calls all those calls to voicemail while continuing to ring for local would be the right balance (kids' school, doctors office, etc...).
iPhones has a setting for this
If your car gets stolen, and the police find it, they will call you from a phone number that's not in your contacts. If you don't pick up, you won't realize that your stolen car has been recovered a couple miles from your house, and if you show up there in 30 minutes you can drive it back home, but if you don't, the police will send it to a towing yard, which will require you to go through 24 hours of paperwork with the police to obtain a release and then pay the towing yard $1,000+ to tow and store your car.
If you live in an area of low crime, though, maybe it'll be fine not to answer phone calls from numbers that aren't in your phone.
Man, that is the most edge case reason I've ever heard for answering anonymous calls.
Medical calls are another, strangers finding your lost stuff is a third. I'm probably forgetting more.
Biggest reason - voicemail. Most numbers have a mailbox limit, it's somewhat common to reach a number that has a full mailbox. Sure, you should be emptying your mailbox, but this still means you can easily drop calls if you haven't checked it in a while.
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I answer every call. no matter what the caller ID. I'm a landlord I have hundreds of rentals. I get calls from police and detectives from blocked numbers sometimes from people that are frantically complaining about something that's very serious and requires my immediate attention to call police or to respond immediately.... I've had situations involving death where you know not answering the phone is not an option at least for me.
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It is. Unless you own a pre-2005 subaru.
How long does it take to listen to a voicemail and call them back? A one or two minute delay is almost never going to cause an issue.
Even in the highest crime areas the ratio of spam calls to legit and urgent calls is going to be thousands to one. You can cumulatively save a lot of time and annoyance by not answering all of those spam calls. I'm actually surprised to see this debated, I also stopped answering unknown numbers years ago and thought that was standard at this point.
I do not pick up the phone unless the caller is in my contact list. No exception (my phone does not even ring).
All other calls are routed to voice-mail and near-instantly transcribed. The message then shows up on my desktop and on my mobile phone. I can read it and respond to it as necessary.
How do you do this? Do you use a modern smartphone?
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If my car got stolen the last thing in the world I would do it take it back immediately.
Who knows what damage has been done to the clutch, or the engine internals while it was bouncing off the rev limiter for minutes at a time. Also I'll bet there is a lot less rubber on the tires than before, and probably all kinds of nasty stuff on the inside.
Heck no I'm not taking it back. That's insurance all day long.
I have different rules that take effect when I'm expecting an incoming call. Such as, I take my phone out of airplane mode.
In my experience, police officers leave voice messages.
I would expect them to leave a voicemail in this situation.
Okay, so maybe answer your phone when you're expecting an important call. But otherwise, probably safe to wait for a text or voicemail.