I never had one in my life. I'm 27 and have had the same number since I was ~13 or so. I did get a few spam text messages, maybe one every three years.
The richest companies on the planet don't robocall me, but they do stalk me all over the internet and wherever I bring my phone, which I consider worse.
Meanwhile I haven't gotten any in many years, because my spam call filter works a treat, and always has.
Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.
And that spam call filter probably requires proprietary software, which has access to your call logs and theres every chance that the spam filter app company can steal your data.
> Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.
This a nice idea but on the rare occasion that your filter incorrectly blocks the wrong person, you might be annoying someone who really needs to talk to you.
They do. The common strategy is to pick numbers with the same area code to pretend to be legal, and some advanced callers try and pick numbers that match even more recognizable digits (like your office). All this traffic is a major source of revenue for VOIP operators.
Now that's getting into some serious philosophy there. In this respect, would we be moral people without it being codified in law? I'd like to lean towards yes, because before state's law it was religious law. Humans have always projected their morals via the powers at be.
Without legislation you'd have large tech corporations running robbery networks tracking everyone's behaviour and and recommending who it would be most profitable to rob today based on their behaviour, location, etc... oh wait.
Legislation doesn't stop criminals. The best way to stop browser tracking online is to make it technologically impossible for malicious actors to track the browser.
But these are incorporated entities. If proper privacy laws are/were put in place and enforced, they would have to honor DNT. This is as much a failing of these companies to respect privacy as it was the failing of governments to protect privacy of their citizens.
Besides violating privacy, ad networks have also been a proxy for malware. They should have been sued into oblivion for that as well.
I agree that since the proper means have failed, blocking is the best solution. Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
It's a matter of what order you want to tackle things in. I'm not interested in only stopping the worst actors. I want to stop all tracking, and if I can't, I'll settle for stopping some of the worst actors through solutions like legislation.
I understand that some people come from the opposite direction -- they try to stop the obvious bad actors with laws, and if those laws fail, then they'll look for solutions that put control in the hands of individuals.
I don't dislike those people, but my perspective is that people who focus on tracking by corporations don't have a good perspective of the entire problem.
> Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
Amen on that. I'd like to see the ad industry collapse, but that's a separate conversation.
I'm not convinced that pervasive advertising to the degree we currently see is good for society as a whole. I would encourage people to block ads even if they didn't include any trackers at all. I would even block ads off of one-way mediums like the radio if I could.
