I'm all for this...but can we just ban telemarketing entirely? Why is that even allowed? I've always thought that the law should be written such that telemarketing is legal, but if you engage in it, it is no longer illegal to murder you. You can do it, but you lose your murder protection.
It’s already illegal to place robocalls to cell phones (under TCPA).
It’s also illegal to robodial any number on the Do Not Call list, but unlike the TCPA, there is a carve out for political campaigning. Thanks, Congress!
Of course, neither does much good when the laws are nearly impossible to enforce. Thanks to caller ID spoofing, it’s usually impossible to tell who actually called you, so good luck collecting damages.
If you really wanted to find out you could just ask the phone company, they know the real number/identity of the person calling you, or at the very least a layer deeper than caller ID. It's not like caller ID spoofing makes you anonymous.
Legitimate companies who deal with mass email on behalf of their clients (such as MailChimp.com) are very careful to prevent abuse, precisely because of the risk of getting blocked (which would sink them, of course).
This is true for me, but only because nobody calls me except for my wife, and even those calls only happen when she's on break at work and bored. All my other non-work-related communication is over SMS, Facebook Messenger, or Discord.
Presumably if the Swedish tax authority called you, they'd speak to you in Swedish, and you'd be suspicious if they couldn't. So if you wanted to run this scam on Swedish targets, you'd need to find a bunch of Swedish speakers willing to work for low wages doing something unethical and illegal. AFAIK, the only country with significant number of Swedish speakers is Sweden, a fairly wealthy country, and also the country where you'd be running the scam, vastly increasing the legal risk.
On the other hand, there are countries which are poor, not the US, and have lots of English speakers, and these scams tend to be run from those countries, at least according to the callers' accents.
I think there are privacy regulations that prevent the phone company from deanonymizing a caller without a warrant. Or at least that’s the excuse I’ve heard cited before.
Through what agency? My local police just give you a pamphlet on avoiding phone scams. And nothing that I've seen has come from my diligent reporting to the FCC. I doubt the FBI is going to give me the time of day.
I just don't answer unknown numbers in my phone anymore.
That is why I said should. You would need to be a lawyer to navigate the court system.
For the local police, you have to push them. They are as lazy as anyone else. They also see murder and speeding as more important crimes to focus on - you need to be annoying enough that they help. You may need to walk into court yourself to get the warrant with no police help - something you can do in theory, but in practice I don't know if anyone has ever done it.
I've heard that robocalls are illegal in Germany. It would be difficult to pass a law banning them in the United States because the people writing the laws are themselves heavy users of robocalls as a part of their election campaigns.
In Canada political campaigns will rent from allied political parties in the US their robocall army to escape domestic laws. A favorite trick now is to relentlessly phone at annoying hours and impersonate the rival "Stay on the line for an important message from (insert rival politician)" in hopes they anger you enough to not vote for said rival.
They are illegal in the UK too, but the law doesn't stop calls coming in from abroad or from marketing companies routing through throwaway UK SIP providers.
I'd just like to see phone companies made to have a free option where customers can turn off all calls from unidentifiable/withheld numbers. That would be easy to implement and stop a lot of the problem.
We ditched our land line about 10 years ago so I totally forgot about that. Although I remember having one of those phones that had the digital address book on it, maybe you have a different model. Also I have T-Mobile and it tells me when a caller is "likely a scammer" and they even let me outright block those callers.
Yep pretty much the same here. I just leave it on vibrate. I have been getting more and more spam calls though, I should try DnD.
I think ringtones are distracting and totally unnecessary, with a few exceptions. My phone is either in my pocket, or on my desk nearby to where I'll see it ring.
I don't understand people who leave it on loud at work (or worse, leave it on loud then leave the phone at their desk). It's really inconsiderate. They are probably oblivious though, without someone mentioning it to them.
While they are at it, also get rid of the spam car and debt consolidation loan mailers. If you opt-out, you also don't get mailers from AmEx on their newest metallic card, which I might want. But I don't need a loan from some unknown institution at near credit-card rates.
I used to get snail mail almost daily from SoFi trying to get me to refinance my student loans with them. It was really annoying, especially since they wouldn't match my credit union's rates, despite my 810+ credit score.
I wonder how much it cost them to send all those mailers. It was at least one a week for a couple years before I finally went to their website to opt out.
I know you're joking, but I (jokingly) considered a law that if you're using your cell phone and are involved in an accident, that accident is your fault and you must pay in excess of actual damages. The problem is of course all the gray areas where there was some emergency, or the unintended side effects of people getting hurt who weren't just being douchebags in traffic.
While we're at it, could we make it illegal for companies to fill my physical mailbox with garbage? Junk mail is a blight on the planet. It's literally just turning trees into garbage with no intermediary step of added value.
politicians at the Federal level excluded themselves from similar rules along with charities. if we can get them to not exclude themselves we might have a chance at blocking everything
What does that mean, exactly? Does the human have to whistle the DTMF frequencies into a handset to initiate the call, or can they use a machine that generates those tones when buttons are pressed? Can a machine automatically press the buttons? If so, how is that different from what is allowed today?
What's hard about this, if a person presses a button that can cause 1 and only one call. You also can't have a machine listen to see if someone picks up then hand off to a person because a human was not listing at the start of the call.
This is probably not the place to nitpick comments for legalese
If I had my way the only legal phone call is one that begins and ends with a one-on-one conversation with a human, preferably one which the receiver has already met
Some big wigs in Hollywood have locked down 99% of our devices so that we can't copy their HD video. I'm pretty sure most of us realize that actually limiting calls to only humans is strictly impossible, but what about getting it to about 99% human with some offenders that we can sue in court.
Fair enough, I could have been more specific. Instead of a dialer calling vast quantities of people and a telemarketer only connecting to the calls that actually go through, the telemarketer should be required to initiate the call (through whatever interface), wait to see if the recipient picks up, and then choose to end the call when they see fit. The point is to allow telemarketing but to keep it a fair and symmetrical affair. One person calling one other person as opposed to me being on the receiving end of hundreds of auto-dialed calls while the telemarketers only have to spend their time with the calls that succeed.
The only practical way to enforce this is to fine the telecom carriers that let the overseas junk calls onto their networks in the first place.
Speaking of which, it would be great to have a 'no foreign origination' inbound policy. That would require VOIP providers to step up, and that seems like a very complex problem.
At this point, I consider telephone communication to be almost a complete loss. We need an entirely new system.
I like the idea of this, but I wonder if it will have much impact on the worst offenders. The most frequent and annoying calls are almost always using spoofed numbers and many times originating from outside the country, like India. Is there any way that this law could be enforced...
1)on calls originating outside the state or country?
Sure there is means within the phone industry to determine if the number offered up is the actual number. Last I remember the caller id function was independent of the ANI information.
Now calls are down to either my contact list or the caller leaving a message whose transcription I can review. All others just get ignored. It was bad enough when politicians wrote the laws in such a way their campaigns and charities did not have to have permission to call but with VOIP being abused so much my phone isn't my own.
with regards to the political exception in calls, how will the Federal rule align with the state rule. it was specifically carved out to allow political calls in the do not call system
Generally speaking if there is a federal law explicitly allowing political calls of a given nature (e.g. robocalls over VOIP) a state law cannot disallow them. It depends on the exact wording of each, and the willingness of both parties to go to court. Even if it's illegal, that only matters when someone is willing to (literally) make a federal case over it.
Agreeing that a thing should be illegal is step 1. At minimum, it allows for prosecution of the most obvious offenders.
And ultimately, money usually trickles back. Why would you be calling Californians if you didn't have an interest (business or otherwise) in California?
No, not this law, because (contrary to the current HN title) it does not apply to telephone calls. Its scope is "any public-facing Internet Web site, Web application, or digital application, including a social network or publication".
This bill isn’t limited to phone calls. It also applies to any bot on any social media site that receives more than 10mm visitors per month that exists to “incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or services in a commercial transaction”. In other words, a Facebook Messenger bot answering pre-sale questions is violating this law unless it has a massive disclosure about it being a bot. At first glance it also appears that this law would make chats in which a bot handles most but not all of the interaction illegal. For example, an online chat with a support tech that begins with an automated “this is Larry, how can I help you?” seems to be illegal under this law. Larry exists, but the bot is “impersonating” Larry during the automated portions of the conversation. This is a poorly thought out, overly broad law.
One sidenote...HN really needs a way to just “save” articles. I didn’t want to upvote this article, because that sends the wrong signal - that I am somehow in favor of unworkable regulations. I didn’t want to “favorite” it either, because this certainly doesn’t fall into the category of my favorite articles that I’d like to keep around on that list for a long time. But I do want to keep track of the discussion today, because I find it fascinating just how many technologists are in favor of onerous regulations governing their own industry. Currently, there is no way to simply save an article on HN without upvoting or favoriting it.
I don't think upvoting is meant to be a signal that you agree with the article - only that you think the article should be seen and discussed by the HN community. You clearly do think this, so an upvote is appropriate. After all, upvoting an 'X has died' post doesn't mean that you're glad they're gone!
Re:bookmarking, I always forget to delete it. I guess I should create a Chrome extension that lets me create a temporary bookmark that will automatically be deleted after X period of time. With regard to upvoting, I'd say articles like this fall in a different category than the death announcements. If you upvote this one, especially given the overwhelmingly positive response to it in the comments, you're at least tacitly endorsing it. Lawmakers that might have rejected this bill because it outlaws many legitimate tasks performed by chat bots might look at the number of upvotes and say "a community of tech people on the web really like it!" and vote for it. I certainly wouldn't want to play even a minor role in the passage of a bill such as this one. I'm not sure that the nuances of upvoting are going to be clear to everyone that visits HN.
> At first glance it also appears that this law would make chats in which a bot handles most but not all of the interaction illegal.
Only illegal if it isn't disclosed that it's a bot ("A person using a bot shall not be liable under this section if the person discloses that it is a bot."), and the bill doesn't dictate the form of that disclosure, only that it must be "clear, conspicuous, and reasonably designed to inform persons with whom the bot communicates or interacts that it is a bot".
Here's a proposal: 1) Caller may choose to hide/suppress their Caller ID, 2) mandatory option for phone carriers to allow Callee to completely block calls (no ring, no voicemail) that don't carry Caller ID, 3) When present Caller ID must be accurate.
The above allows anonymity but disallows deceit. It also provides opt-out for people not to receive anonymous calls. (Anonymity does not give you the right to have any given individual listen to you)
We could have had this for ages, as there are no great technical hurdles.
Note on above: there are legitimate reasons for businesses to set Caller ID to something other than the call origin. But the "something other" should be selected from a set under the control of the business, not a free for all. I.e., a desk phone with DID may show as the main company number, etc.
This takes a little more work to account for, but it shouldn't be a roadblock.
No, a phone should give the exact number for that exact phone, since that is whom I want to call back, should I need to. That phone may be manned by more than one individual (in case of shift work), but nobody should have to go through a phone tree.
If we want authentication, public-private key pairs are a great idea.
A trusted network is fine, but are the telephone networks trusted? Can't get them to implement simple features in our interests, doesn't seem very much like a trusted third party to me. Meanwhile, OTT services work. Some let you whitelist contacts. Killer features like that will push everyone off POTS eventually anyway.
Inertia and legacy will keep holdouts using POTS, just like people still use fax machines, but they're mostly irrelevant.
> A trusted network is fine, but are the telephone networks trusted?
In the old days there was an assumption that if you were in the network then you were trusted, which was always dicey but made more sense when Ma Bell controlled everything tightly. Since the monopoly breakup that model was no longer true, and many problems can trace back to the nature of back patching security onto an entirely different model that no longer fits reality.
You should try to add a bit more depth to your mental model. Most of us recognize differences between private citizens and public officials and government agents or between not wanting to be spied upon and wanting to know who the fuck is calling you so that you can rationally choose whether to ignore it.
You're right, and my argument is not fully worked out. I had the thought yesterday and didn't post - I just find it odd that we're demanding "real ID" for telephone calls, but recoil in horror when proposals are made to tie "real ID" to IP addresses to online activity.
I frequently advise my clients on website security, and tell them that all day long there are criminals who "jiggle the locks" (to put it tamely) of their website without any legal recourse or ramifications. They always ask why these people aren't identified and criminally prosecuted. I explain to them how they evade detection, and how "anonymity" is built into the ethos of our online world. Clients are shocked there's no way to identify, stop or even prosecute these people. Privacy advocates of course champion this anonymity because of the danger of abuse by government/corporate entities. Why don't we have the same attitude towards telephone calls? Both systems are widely abused, yet privacy for both are important.
Like I said, this one is still rolling a round in my head - feel free to tear my argument a new one ;)
I think part of the problem is that caller ID claims to provide clear identification. People are conditioned to believe caller ID and don't realize it can be easily spoofed. This feeds into the scam because people are willingly more gullible.
I think you'll find many people are not in favor of universal anonymity, and most people are in favor of strong guarantees of identity. They are separate issues and useful in different cases.
There's anonymity, fraud, and strong guarantees of identity. I'm fine with 1 and 3. There's no reason for the phone company to have a knowingly spoofable caller ID system when it's already being used so heavily for 2.
"most people are in favor of strong guarantees of identity"
I dunno, folks on HN seem pretty opposed to this given the potential for abuse by government/business.
They typically say someting like "sure it will stop spammers, but what happens when I use my phone to call a political opponent or an organization that criticizes authorities?"
You should be able to call politicians or organizations which criticise authorities, and they should set up anonymous means of doing so (perhaps required by law). You shouldn't be able to call someone's Grandma, impersonate her son, and scam her out of her retirement.
I think the problem is an "anonymous tip line" just for criticizing or whistle blowing purposes is too limited in scope. There are plenty of other reasons people need anonymity where you can't setup a dedicated, anonymous system. You would also be at the mercy of those who setup the system, because you'd be calling it with your "real ID" telephone line. If you setup a general system that allows anonymity on-demand, it will be abused.
I'm not advocating for or against this, just trying to work out the ethical model where citizens are protected, but criminals can be identified and prosecuted. I don't have the answer ;)
For the first decade or so of caller ID it pretty much told the truth. Businesses sent their number or withheld it entirely. Most countries have legislation requiring businesses to have some level of visibility - publishing address or registration info etc.
Since the growth of robodiallers and sales scams faked CLID has become almost the default. It got so bad that I simply no longer answer calls that aren't in my contacts. They've ruined the phone system.
As for anonymity, I'm imagine most who would approve of it for individuals would not think it sensible for a business. Why would I trust or give money to a business that wants to be anonymous and lie about themselves?
So yeah, I'd like unfakeable CLID and to get back to a working phone system.
Attempts so far to ban bot accounts have resulted in a purge of real people who are critical of western governments.
When Facebook decided to ban the accounts as identified by Ben Nimmo's team at the Atlantic Council, it also purged people critical of western governments' foreign policies. When this is government mandated I think you see the threat to "free speech."
I'm sure this is a bonus to those pushing the react-to-bots-at-all-costs agenda, but they also seem to be the first to complain about the silencing of dissident voices they happen to agree with.
Having spoken to one of them in person about all their posts being disappeared from Facebook.
The only action that they can think of for "violation of their terms of service" they know of is having posts critical of government claims regarding foreign policy, and it's pretty much the same time Facebook announced they were getting tough on bots and blocking bot accounts.
They're better connected than me and know others who have had this happen to them at the same time too.
Exactly. It gives the government the ability to decide ( and act on ) what they think is and isn't a bot. Again. It sounds good. But do we trust our government to make these decisions? Do they have a track record of actually working for their 'people'? In my lifetime, sadly, no.
I hate telemarketing, election influencing and political social network bots impersonating people altogether so it sounds great but doesn't this probably mean it is going to become illegal to build a chatbot, give it a human name and a [legally acquired] human face avatar? Will it actually affect telemarketing/political bots only?
BTW I have always wondered why do only the major political parties and their allies ever use bots for political influence. Obviously, real geeks could do much better at this if they would want and there probably are many gray/black hat hackers that would probably not hesitate for just moral/legal reasons but there still seems to be no bots that would try to influence something like the votes on net neutrality, ACTA/SOPA, the European Internet copyright law etc.
Not a lot of the influence stuff is actually "bots", much of it is simply low-wage humans from another country. Or Facebook ads. And maintaining a large enough pool of burner accounts is hard work or costs money.
Because of the low quality. All the bots I've encountered were ridiculous. Like different "people" starting to follow me on Google+ (obviously intending to attract my attention so I would follow back) at the same moment and posting exactly the same (equal as string values) "thoughts" simultaneously. You can also find crowds of human-impersonating political bots posting exactly the same things on Twitter and in comments many times.
I've been wanting to build an online-only bot of myself for some time.
This bot would impersonate me and interact with any service provided over the internet, such as banks, government, even ordering a cab. It could both write and speak just as well as I do and would act on my behalf. I can handle potential issues personally.
the whole reason behind such a system would be so that the other parties don't know that they're conversing with an ai representation of myself. otherwise they'll just ask for me instead.
I have just read an article about someone who won a lawsuit against telemarketers at http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-telemarkete.... I think people could try this way to make some of them think twice before they harass us with their unwanted calls.
The EFF has written about this specific bill, and is concerned this was poorly scoped and may infringe protected speech. I would expect litigation to follow.
The title here says the bill is about telemarketing, but the bill is pretty short and I didn't see anything about telemarketing. This is just about limiting bots on "any Internet Web site, Web application, or digital application"
Sorry, I am not a native English speaker. I made the title by rewriting this sentence to fit into 80 characters limit:
"This bill would, with certain exceptions, make it unlawful for any person to use a bot to communicate or interact with another person in California online with the intent to mislead the other person about its artificial identity for the purpose of knowingly deceiving the person about the content of the communication in order to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or services in a commercial transaction or to influence a vote in an election."
Specifically telemarketing was the only English term for "in order to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or services in a commercial transaction" part that I recalled. Sorry if it was misleading.
Telemarketing is specifically about marketing via phone calls. The phrase you want is "online marketing", although that is a bit longer. Almost all of the discussion in the comments thread here is about phone calls.
So is Wikipedia's definition "Telemarketing is defined as contacting, qualifying, and canvassing prospective customers using telecommunications devices such as telephone, fax, and internet" wrong? Or is it just misleadingly general?
Yeah, that definition is wrong, as evidenced by the confusion in this comment thread. I can't find a dictionary definition that matches what Wikipedia says. Every dictionary I checked [1] [2] [3] [4] specifies that telemarketing is marketing via the phone. Telemarketing is telephone marketing.
Is this about telemarketing? Everything in it seems to refer only to online communication over a social platform "that has 10,000,000 or more unique monthly United States visitors".
Am I missing where it applies to telemarketing?
I wonder if, conversely, this could lead to the development of better "bots" where you'd be unable to tell the difference. The motive is certainly there now.
Call me crazy, but I have this weird theory that maybe some of these spam calls could be a form of subtle psi-ops, in the vein of "hypernormalization", designed to exacerbate political prejudices.
Think of "stochastic resonance".
Its one of the few reasons I could think of for "blank" robo calls. They seem almost intentionally annoying, so my thought is that they could be designed to activate and prime irrational regional biases.
For example, someone has been spoofing my number to call people in Alabama. I get about 5 calls back per day from 251 numbers!
> Its one of the few reasons I could think of for "blank" robo calls.
Telephone spammer software dials a load of numbers, and when someone picks up, only then do they connect the call to a human on their end. It's why you often get a weird pause before they actually say anything, and if there happens not to be a human available you get a "blank" call.
What do you mean? Eloquence and persuasive methods have existed at least since Antiquity (just look at the records of Plato in Greece). What it takes to believe any kind of BS is just the absence of critical thinking. This is the real root cause.
I really doubt that pure eloquence can compete with the visual smorgasbord that modern marketers can create, all learned after spending billions on mass market advertising over decades.
Plato couldn't laser-target his message to 5,000 different segments carefully curated with an extensive re-marketing campaign.
Landowners in general would be a good place to start, people who are smart enough to contribute to society and have a vested interest in the country succeeding.
Every citizen has an interest in the country succeeding. I rent because I live in a densely populated area with high land prices. Does this mean I'm not contributing to society or would be ok if the country failed?
Agreed. Why not get ahead of the problem and focus on teaching our kids critical thinking skills? But then again, why would the government cut off their primary revenue supply?
Make a concrete proposal for solving this. People have always been vulnerable to propaganda but not it can be done a on scale and with a precision like never before.
We might jokingly call this the first bill against robot rights.
To play robot devil's advocate... the future dystopia probably isn't a campaign driven by a fear of AI, but driven by a fear of programming in general, and skepticism towards anyone who is able to automate tasks and do things more efficiently.
We all know the early history of the loom that birthed programmable machines, and how the community fought to destroy the machines.
People were displaced from jobs, and that drove them in part. But people also get angry when anyone points out to them that there is an easier way to do something they've been doing the hard way. It's a well known psychological phenomenon known as "effort justification."
Look at the post from yesterday full of stories of people being able to automate their job. When middle management found out, sometimes there was gratitude, but most often the reaction was fear or anger, firing them for insubordination despite showing how the company could save money.
There's an 80s movie where Kevin Bacon is teaching a group of kids how to camp in the mountains. Sean Astin builds a fish trap after no one else can catch fish, comes back with plenty for everyone. Bacon throws the dozen fish away, saying he didn't deserve them and everyone should just go hungry.
It's dramatized, but we see that in real life. The idea that someone hired for data entry can have a more measurable impact on the company's bottom line after a week at the company than a manager can who has spent years climbing the rungs can be seen as a personal affront.
Why is there this gap in thinking about the world between people who look for clever shortcuts and people who support labor for labor's sake?
There's a famous intro to CS lecture that has been reposted here a few times here. In it, the professor talks about the process of computer science as a step beyond algebra, it's about thinking of forumlas of processes. Thinking about processes like variables that can be modified, or as having components and properties.
People who have tried programming a while often understand this intuitively, and people who haven't, don't.
If you understand that, you can see how trivial it is to replicate simple processes. You can see there's no functional difference between a society that makes these calls using silicon and a society that makes these calls using meat. Mechanical turk is just another black box. It seems obviously strange to make numbers illegal or place export controls on a dozen or so lines of easily memorized code. And it's really hard or impossible to explain these positions to people who don't see the world that way.
You may realize all that, but still find yourself upset at these robocalls. If that's the case, ask yourself what you're really upset about. Is it the method of the calls, or is it the calls themselves? Are you better off somehow if you are manually called at exactly the same rate with exactly the same scripts?
Banning the method mainly just reserves the technique for people who own a call center.
I see no reason to give that class of people additional power over everyone else.
I see no reason to scapegoat automation here and tell people it's acceptable to continue to fear programs.
