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Stop Treating Phone Numbers As A Digital ID
(notthesolution.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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To the same audience: quit selling my fucking phone number!
I ditched a phone number I had for 10+ years because it was leaked everywhere. Only a few short months after updating my number with the DMV and a handful of other government agencies I started receiving scam calls/messages again.
At some point we need to adopt some fucking privacy laws. This is absolutely bonkers—is no one else fed up??
Edit: I already know how to silence unknown callers. What I want is to not have the problem in the first place, ideally by 1) having companies not sell personal data to third parties and 2) being able to block spoofed (non-encrypted) caller ID.
FTFY
Australia has a "do not call register". It seems to mostly work, but telcos are having trouble with calls originating from outside the network with spoofed caller ID. We still get spam/scam calls from India among other places.
Even if they're not calling you directly, they are still using your phone number to link you to things and create a shadow profile behind the scenes.
So does the US, though you need to re-register every so often. It works pretty well, but it's not advertised very well.
Oh everyone is fed up but we just elected a guy and government who is sure to make it all way way way worse.
He just helped put the nail in the coffin of the lie that crypto is for anything but scams, don't worry, it's gonna get real bad before it gets any better.
In South Africa, where I live, everyone is assigned an ID Number at Birth. You need an ID number, thumbprint scan AND proof of address to get issued a SIM card number due to a law introduced called RICA. It was meant to help fight crime. Worried that the government could listen in to calls or read their SMSs, the criminals just switched to WhatsApp, which also happened to become cheaper than SMSs and gained popularity in this time.
The cops never seemed to crack WhatsApp. The only drug busts that happen are when an open secret becomes laughably too open and when they harass every person arriving from South America at O.R. Tambo international airport just to catch the decoy mules carrying 12g of cocaine (total). Every dealer I ever organised with was over WhatsApp.
So now, woopsi, RICA stopped nothing and just became a liability. That treasure trove of fragile data made its way to scammers and spammers. A total net negative.
I'd encourage everyone else in other countries to apply major pushback to any government proposals in this direction.
Did we? My government leader hasn't changed nor have we had an election lately
There's a subset of Americans who are rather like ostriches: heads so deeply buried in the sand that they forget anything exists outside their immediate surroundings. Reminding them that the rest of the world is out there rarely has any positive results, however.
I'm pretty sure a lot of scam calls use machines that call every possible phone number within an area code and see who answers. There is no way to avoid it.
this right here. I stopped getting scam calls years ago, I stopped answering and they just eventually stopped calling. If you don't interact with the call (interact being ignore it or mute it NOT reject it) and it just goes to voicemail, they seem to eventually stop
Lucky you. I've been letting calls from any number I don't recognize go to voicemail for years and nothing ever seems to change.
Setup a whitelist, I think it's native on iPhone and there are multiple Android apps. Only calls from your contact list will ring through. My voicemail is, "You're getting this because you're not on my contact list, send a text and I'll get back to you."
If you're job hunting, or work in specific fields this may not be a reasonable thing to do and that's at least part of the problem.
This would deem troublesome yea, being said I firmly believe in separating work and home. I wouldn't be willing to use a personal number for work related activities, at least not public related activities. Being said, I have no good solution for that, at least you are being paid for the scam call I guess.
Job hunting is what I meant. And you pretty much have to use your personal phone for that. I haven't ever had a company phone. Doubt they'd give it to techs.
lists sourced from drivers licenses and motor vehicle registration records are literally sold by some states.
Yep, wish I’d known that a couple years ago.
Source?
wisconsin literally has an opt-out/opt-in (based on your current status) box on vehicle registration renewal forms, for one.
I set my phone to decline calls from unknown callers years ago.
These calls are already illegal. I used to report them to the FTC but I never heard anything back so I have no idea what happens, but I presume nothing. If I had the time to take them, and if they spoke English, I would record them with the Cube ACR app (which no longer works) and convince them to incriminate themselves. Ask their name, company, location, time/date, whether they ran my number through the DNC registry.
I'm confused of how this keeps happening to people.
Like I use my phone on most sites that allow it and I've never had spam/scam calls really, but I've also explicitly unchecked the marketing boxes that appear on the signup so maybe that it.
The last instance that actually happened to me was with entering my university a few years ago for my BS degree. They 1000% sold my contact information as some part of the deans/honors list process. I reached out to them and stopped that so fast.