How we stopped the nuisance calls
or, Why Communities are more effective than Government.
But they haven’t stopped, I hear you say.
It’s true that until a few days ago I would get a few each week and sometimes several in a day. Being called is still (for me at least) a more personal thing than being written to. The phishing spam and virus attachements that come through on email are much, much less intrusive.
Calls like this are at an epidemic level in the UK.
This Guardian article estimates the total number of calls at about 10 billion a year, approximately 200 per adult. The government is planning measures including mandatory caller ID, but central regulation has so far failed.
The UK’s Telephone Preference Service is supposed, once you have registered your number, to stop calls from legitimate businesses that you’ve not opted-in to. 10 billion calls. There must be an awful lot of illegitimate businesses!
The regulator Ofcom has advice on how to protect yourself from these calls, but why can’t they stop them? Surely the phone network operators that Ofcom regulates have the technical ability to sort this out?
The authorities and self-regulation have failed. It’s down to us, the besieged consumer, to sort this out.
Digging around this week, it turns out this is already happening…
How? A community of mobile phone users who report nuisance calls via an app, which can then ‘identify’ negatively rated numbers when they call you. It’s such a simple idea (and appears relatively hard to abuse).
Welcome to Truecaller, a ‘community-based spam list of over 200 million users and phone list of a billion numbers. That’s a huge number of users for a service I’d never heard of before I started researching this problem.
The Truecaller app has 3.7 million reviews on Google Play (though only 35k on Windows and a paltry 68 on the Apple App store). What kind of user base will Truecaller build when they are fully up and running on IOS? They must already be sitting on a mountain of data — let’s hope they don’t ‘do an Adblock Plus’ and start selling our numbers to advertisers!
I’ve had Truecaller on my iPhone for a week now (the free, ad-funded version — there’s also a ‘pro’ subscription service) and haven’t had a spam call in that time, which is promising. Even if the service isn’t perfect, or if the call-spammers improve their technology and start breaking through this protective layer, the exciting thing is that the community and ‘our’ technology is now there to fight back.
Government and central regulation couldn’t sort this out, but a community can.
I find this inspiring and it is surely a clear signal that government needs to rethink regulation and self-regulation, how it operates, and how it is conceived and funded.
EDIT/UPDATE 17/10/16
Truecaller isn’t blocking all the nuisance calls. It seems that the service works more effectively with Android than IOS.
So there’s more work to be done. But the model is, I’m sure, the right one.
