Story from Germany. In the last 2 months I have been getting weekly something like 1-2 calls in the beginning and now, this week almost 10 calls from all kinds of numbers from various german numbers. Looking into them (online, people reporting these calls, all are ads and all kind of bullsh*t).
I don't share my number, it was quite private, I never got these calls, maybe I had 5 calls in 5 YEARS, now I get more than that in one day. Why is this, I think? A lot of restaurants use lists and then just pass them to guests at the tables or make them visible for everyone writing on them. Recently there are places that offer QR codes and individual forms, and it gets better, but having these lists visible, anyone that is at the restaurant can just take a picture of the whole list.
I could say that I entered a different name some time ago and I got a spam call asking "Is this different name?", but that would be illegal and I would get a fine. :)
Paraphrasing TuringNYC[0] from another recent HN thread[1]:
> Just a decade ago, SMS messages in the US cost 10 to 25 cents per SMS. You also got charged for spam SMS. Prices were completely disjointed from the reality of underlying costs (zero for the telcos).
> In the following ten years, the tech giants sweeped in, competed, provided a better service, with better cross-platform support, for zero dollar immediate cost to the end customer -- gained a massive following (think whatsapp), and are now vilified for their "monopoly" and the "harm" it has caused.)
The only thing holding back a messaging-style disruption of voice services is the universal inter-operability of phone numbers. Various apps can be used for voice calls within the apps themselves but they're not compatible with a phone call from a landline for restaurant booking confirmations and such.
Google Voice achieves this and Twilio got a mention in the other thread, but I'm not sure what else is out there (I'm not in the US so it's not a problem I need to solve for myself). Seems that US telco's are still asleep at the wheel in regards to their consumer-level services and will devolve into providing purely network connectivity and losing entirely any of the services that sit atop the network.
What's ridiculous is that such things have become necessary. That there's no (enforced) legislation to prevent selling any and all contact information that passes a receptionists desk.
I suggest signing up for the DNC list[0]. It will at least stop legally operations which sometimes sell their list to more shady operations. It at least helps. I often report calls too.
Maybe one of you all that is good at phone apps could make one to fill out the forum automatically. I'm not sure why this already isn't a feature in Google considering they screen calls.
Unfortunately those lists are mandated by law. We had an idea to pitch to the government to introduce a better system but they won't hear it after RKI's/SAP's super-magic contact tracing app they spent 15 million euro on...
I think it's important to remember how March-us was thinking. It was much more important back then to have a working system than the best possible system, and frankly if this is the price of good contact tracing it's probably worth it.
That's the problem, though - we're finding that the majority of exposures are coming from super-spreader events, not one-off, individual encounters. They haven't released statistics yet for how good it's been working, so there's no way to know if their approach was helpful.
Even then, SAP is the one that developed it for 15 million. The important bits were already completely by the universities. SAP just made a UI for it - for 15 million euros. That's an insane, absurd price to pay.
Provide a disposable number and e-mail address. For example, use a pre-paid 2nd SIM for this purpose and discard it after a year (mine gets cancelled after 6 months of no use). With regards to e-mail there's various solutions for that.
I wholeheartedly recommend masking your email and phone number with blur/abine. Every website I have an account with literally thinks I have a different email address. You can also mask your credit card number but you have to pay extra for it so I don't.
My only regret is that I do still get the spam texts and calls. I am thinking that I should somehow make my current number a google voice number or something so that there can be just an automated system that asks them to press any number to connect. Something that simple would stop 100% of my spam calls because they are all robocall recordings.
I think that, as long as you're okay with paying for a service, it can be fairly easy. It's when you want to do it all yourself that you have to be an OPSEC professional. There is plenty of middle ground of paying someone who knows what they're doing to provide the ability to better mask who you are and make it expensive for someone to spam you. Make them waste their time talking to your automated answering service for a change.
But yeah, it's frustratingly complicated. Some of this stuff just seems like it should be a built-in feature of modern telecommunications. My cell provider should give me the ability to present an automated message for free, and at least block numbers... mine doesn't even let me block numbers, I have to do it at the phone level so I still get voicemail messages. That kind of stuff seems like it should be considered basic service.
spamgourmet.com has been around for years (two decades at this point I think?) and does give you disposable emails without the need to configure anything about the alias before using it.
And you believe your interest in privacy is more important than others interest in stopping the spread of a pandemic? Be aware, this is the same argument anti-maskers are making.
I don't share my number, it was quite private, I never got these calls, maybe I had 5 calls in 5 YEARS, now I get more than that in one day. Why is this, I think? A lot of restaurants use lists and then just pass them to guests at the tables or make them visible for everyone writing on them. Recently there are places that offer QR codes and individual forms, and it gets better, but having these lists visible, anyone that is at the restaurant can just take a picture of the whole list.
I could say that I entered a different name some time ago and I got a spam call asking "Is this different name?", but that would be illegal and I would get a fine. :)