Roger Fingas
With the help of Apple, T-Mobile is aiming to bring a new anti-robocall technology to iPhones "in the near future," a report said on Wednesday.
The technology, developed in partnership with Comcast, is currently limited to a handful of LG and Samsung phones on T-Mobile and its Metro brand, according to Reuters. Authentic callers are marked as "verified," making it easier to figure out which calls to answer and which to ignore.
T-Mobile is relying on a standard called "Secure Telephony Identity Revisited (STIR) and Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN)." In fact it ultimately had little choice, since U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai told carriers in February that he would intervene if they failed to implement STIR/SHAKEN by the end of 2019. T-Mobile is however the first American carrier to do so.
AT&T should follow suit, since it tested a cross-network STIR/SHAKEN call with Comcast in March.
Robocalls have become epidemic in the U.S., now averaging over 168 million per day by YouMail metrics. Some 40 percent of that is thought to be scams.
Especially troublesome are so-called "neighbor" scams, which masquerade as calls from a person's area code. This makes it difficult or impossible to tell whether a call is from a legitimate friend or business before picking up.
iPhones already have call blocking and ID features as of iOS 10, and there are other countermeasures you can take, but these require downloading third-party apps like Hiya and aren't 100 percent effective — in large part because of spoofing tactics.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
23 Comments
In other news,Robocallers plan to implement new technology measures to circumvent STIR/SHAKEN in early 2020.
I would simply like an option to have all calls go to VM unless the caller is in my contacts. And if no VM is left, that call is deleted and blocked. How hard can that be?
I don’t think blocking or screening helps the problem of robocalls. Those responses just pushes the problem onto other people.
Robocalls are popular because they have “no” cost. I use the service from Jolly Roger Telephone to help with this. JR impersonates a real person answering the phone to get a real person on the line on their end. This ties up a real person and makes it actually cost the robocall outfit something because they are paying for a real person at that point. Since signing up for JR, I now relish all the telemarking calls I receive instead of fearing them or getting mad.