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A specific practical objection to modern blocking culture (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by sparr@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can unblock numbers if you need to, its not forever?

I have ~100 blocked numbers, statistically, its extremely unlikely that a legit person will attempt to contact me from one of those numbers. And the number of legit contacts from a random phone number (not a contact) is pretty close to zero.

[–] sparr@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

It's extremely unlikely ... YOU, sure. But it's absolutely certain that legit people will be blocked from contacting from those numbers to hundreds or thousands of other people.