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An appeals court threw out part of a Federal Communications Commission regulation aimed at reducing automated telephone solicitations, weakening a 2015 effort to squelch the scourge of so-called robocalls.
The rule was aimed at calls generated by auto-dialing devices. But its language was too broad, and could be construed to prohibit calls from any smartphone, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in a unanimous opinion Friday.
[...] Unwanted calls, including robocalls, are the top consumer complaint to the FCC, with more than 200,000 such comments received annually, according to the agency. Some private analyses estimate that U.S. consumers received about 2.4 billion robocalls per month in 2016.
[...] Because under the FCC's rule "any uninvited call or message from the device is a statutory violation," regular smartphone users could face a $500 penalty for calls -- such as inviting a person to a party -- without first getting consent to contact them, the judges said.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:02PM (5 children)
And so it is! What's wrong with that?
If I didn't give you my phone number to call me, to my mind, you have no right to call me.
Yes, I'm paying extra to my phone provider to have both my landline and my mobile numbers kept out of any phone book. I'll let aside I see this extra fee as sorta extortion - privacy should be on by default - if I'm paying for my privacy, then damn'd right violating it brings in a financial damage aspect into it.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday March 17 2018, @07:50PM (2 children)
It should be relatively simple to address this, so that wrong numbers and "that drunken jerk who *someone* brought to your last party finagled your phone number so he could worm his way onto the guest list for the next one "cuz you got all the cuties at yo' parties! Especially that brunette with the cute glasses [your wife]. I'd love to bang her!" and suchlike can be addressed ("don't fucking call me, asshole!" and onto the blacklist they go) without resort to criminal penalties.
Just modify as follows:
"any uninvited or unwanted call or message of a commercial nature from the device is a statutory violation,"
Easy peasy. Next!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:24PM (1 child)
So political and religious propaganda is ok?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:35PM
Yup.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @10:36PM (1 child)
T-Mobile labels some calls as likely scams, I'm curious how they go about that, I assume it's either by the volume of calls from a number or because they know it's a spoofed number.
I remember one time getting a phone call from the same phone that it was calling. At some point, the telephone companies need to be held accountable for allowing people to use spoofed numbers to call people. Or, perhaps, just connect those calls to virtual answering machines that respond with a seemingly reasonable voicemail prompt, but immediately delete the message they leave.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:16PM
I have an entry in my phone's address book for someone named "Scam Robot". I forgot what the initial call was about, but the contact has accumulated additional phone numbers as calls are identified and categorized.
If I search my address book for "spam" I get a partial list of ingredients for a Monty Python skit. (That is, there are duplicates.)
Anyway, I haven't seen any scams labeled by T-Mobile, but the re-use of phone numbers has allowed me to build my own labeling system.
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