Robocalls with AI voices to be regulated under Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the agency says. I’m pretty sure this puts us on the timeline where we eventually get incredible, futuristic tech, but computers and robots still sound mechanical and fake.
How does this get enforced though? They don’t even enforce their no call list or cut down on junk robo calls as it is.
Don’t undersell the FCC’s rules around robocalling. No, we’re still getting robocalls out the ass, but when it comes from US locations companies get their asses handed to them. The FCC is also the entity that’s pushing the telcos to Make it possible to stop it from overseas sources. The new laws that went in place this year f***** up my twilio automation that was sending me SMS messages on server failures. All of a sudden I have a bunch of paperwork to fill out and a waiting list to be able to send an SMS via API.
If the FCC wasn’t impeding robocalls as much as it is phones would be useless by now.
Man some of these are funny, bold and ironic
`` The FCC described the other 12 companies’ attached “robocall mitigation plans” as follows:
Humbolt VoIP: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification was a .PNG file depicting an indiscernible object.” National Cloud Communications: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification was a document titled ‘Windows Printer Test Page’ that was unrelated to robocall mitigation.” Route 66 Broadband: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification consisted of a signed declaration by the Company’s CEO presented without additional content or context.” Tech Bizz Solutions: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification contained a letter, unrelated to robocall mitigation, from Harvard Business Services, Inc.” 2054235 Alberta: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification contained only the company’s business address.” Evernex: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification was a .PNG file that depicted the filer’s ‘Taxpayer Profile’ on a Pakistani government website.” My Taxi Ride: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification was a copy of an FCC public notice titled ‘FCC Facilitates Review of Restoring Internet Freedom Record.’” (Restoring Internet Freedom was the title of the FCC’s 2017 net neutrality repeal.) Nervill: The “attachment provided was a signature page on company letterhead with no substantive content or context.” SIA Tet: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification was a letter that stated: ‘Unfortunately, we do not have such a documents.’” Textodog: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification was a .PNG file that depicted a corporate icon.” USA-Connect.net: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification contained only a signature.” Viettel Business Solutions: “The robocall mitigation plan attached to its certification was a promotional document titled ‘Viettel Solutions: Making Smart Cities Vision a Reality.’”
``
Lmao what on earth is that
Not the worst thing someone has ever stuck on a photocopier.
For the past 2 weeks I have been getting calls from a company claiming to register companies for voice search optimization. I’ve repeatedly told them to stop calling me, to which they respond that the calls won’t relent until I sign up with their service. I’ve been threatened, mocked, and just straight hung up on, so now I enjoy just waisting as much of their time as possible. I filed a complaint last week, so I’m just logging all their calls to increase the inevitable fine (they’re US based, all of the agents are clearly American).
tell them you’re interested, keep them on the line for as much time as possible, waste them every time. that becomes expensive for them at a point.
I feel like most of the decent filtering of these types of calls are happening at the carrier level at this point. At least in my experience. They’ve been getting better at filtering them out before your phone even rings…
But I’m not sure that’s how it should be. This is why regulatory agencies exist in the first place. What’s the point if there is zero enforcement?
I also had the same setup and the same result from the A2P bullshit. Switched to email and DeltaChat instead and will be happy when I finish it lol.
e result from the A2P bullshit. Switche
pagerduty has a free option that fit me.
For me that would be swapping out one rug pull for an inevitable other down the road, but thanks for the suggestion ♥️
I was more than willing to pay for them, they want five accounts though. Like give me some way to pay for you that actually makes sense I’m totally down for it.
Absolutely! Services that are provided for free with no (reasonable) way to pay for at a hobby level are a huge bugbear of mine.
Most robo calls are not illegal as long as you follow the rules the FTC laid down.
This would have ban AI generated voices, so regardless of the content of the robo call, if it used in AI voice it would be illegal.
I need a citation for this “most”, because if I recall correctly, “most” people are getting the illegal kind of robo calls, not the legal kind.
Good call.
Looks like 55% are legitimate and the rest were scams.
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/state-of-robocalls/
Damn, you were the technically correct one here :D But it’s a lot closer to 50/50 than I thought.
Totally lucky break on my side, I didn’t know the scammers still held such a large percentage.
If the origin of the call is outside the US it’s much harder to prosecute the illegal calls
Not really? You don’t allow companies who don’t operate in the USA to have USA based numbers. And don’t allow them to spoof numbers. This way people can actually block international calls if they don’t want them and it’s clear from the get-go that it’s not Microsoft or your state representative calling you from India.
Not allowing spoofed numbers would be a great improvement that I wish our government (or it agencies) would do
That would do a lot to stop these kinds of calls
They could even allow “Aliased” numbers… eg, a company has 10 numbers, and all outgoing come from the “main” number… But that should be specifically registered and validated by phone carriers as a thing rather than just showing the spoofed CID that we get these days. that way if the number generates complaints, the government can simply look at the registered alias and punish the correct people.
That’s a great idea
In practice it prevents any rando from using a spoofed number and still allows corporations to have their internal phone lines behind a layer of obscurity
But how stupid would you have to be to take a call from half way around the world and listen to their advice about the upcoming election? A phone call that claims to come from a local politician is a lot more believable if it comes from a local number.
They spoof numbers. It almost always is a number from my state or the area code, very rarely do I get calls from out of state and they are all already labeled “spam risk/telemarketer” when they come in.
Also thank you for writing this comment, I was going to say ios had no way to block unknown numbers, but I searched to double check myself and they finally do have that option! It may have been around for quite awhile, I hadn’t checked for a long while.
They spoof local numbers
Exactly. Laws have no meaning if you don’t enforce them or enforce them selectively.
just fucking declare robocalls illegal, jesus
politicians use them for campaigning so unlikely, but yeah they should ban robo calls that haven’t been pre-authorized (having the pharmacy or whatever call should still be legal)
They are… And have been since 2009. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/do-not-call-registry/robocalls
It seems like most people are missing “under existing law”
Nothing is changing. The FCC is simply putting to a vote clarifying that “yes, the prohibitions regarding automated calling apply to AI generated voices too.”
I also read that as we ain’t gonna do shit
No need to do shit.
Yes just reaffirming that it’s just another law not enforced.
Let’s just make robo calls illegal ok?
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/do-not-call-registry/robocalls
It’s been since 2009. They need to enforce laws.
All these calls are coming from India and their government just do not give a shit. As they are all massively corrupt.
OK. Enforce it then.
Block all calls unless you can verify exactly who they’re from. Block all overseas VOIP bullshit. Block calls from any country that doesn’t have the same call verification rules.
Blame the Republicans in Congress.
It took until last May for the Senate to finally confirm the fifth Commissioner. Per law, they can’t create new rules or regulations when there’s a vacancy.
Have you noticed that 5G was getting faster and had more coverage until it more or less stopped last year? For the first time in history, Congress did not renew the FCC’s spectrum auction authority. T-Mobile bought a lot of 2.5Ghz spectrum back in 2022 but the FCC couldn’t grant it to them. It wasn’t until a month and a half ago that they could use it… Because Congress passed a bill that granted the authority for auctions held prior to March 2023.
They’ve also tried going after the VOIP services that don’t follow STIR/SHAKEN or allow robocallers. But they don’t have enough funding to do much more than the minimum. For the very few that they can catch, they first provide a warning period for the company to remove robocallers and correct their systems. If that fails, the FCC then permits carriers to block the provider, but they can’t mandate it.
Except even that’s not enough. The FCC can’t take actual legal action against the providers, only the robocallers. So quite often, the provider will just change their business name, list different fake people as their executives, and then rejoin the networks as if nothing ever happened. Look up One Owl Telecom - they’ve done this numerous times.
But its too hard to implement! Give us money! (telecoms probably)
Seems you could do all of that easily enough with asterisk or any of its variants/frontends. Bonus, you can tweak the rules as you like, on the fly.
For awhile I was getting obv scam calls from china - I neither know anyone there nor do business of any kind there. That country code would be one of the first on my blacklist.
If they banned all robocalling, wouldn’t that solve it? Can a prioritisation of quality of life over marketing include the phone space? Four US states ban billboards. With an ad blocker, the internet is usable. Nitpicking which tactics can be used in robocalls won’t hardly solve the vicious spread of misinformation in this way.
banned all robocalling
Oh, I didn’t realize this was literally Nazi Germany.
A slippery slope where the next thing you know, corporations aren’t people, they’re capping the unlimited anonymous campaign contributions, and ad-supported Neuralink requires informed consent.
I assume that banning all robocalls requires new legislation, whereas the regulation mentioned here didn’t.
Robocalling isn’t inherently bad. Utilities and such institutions that have your membership (library, gym, health care etc) should be welcome to use robocalling to notify you of useful info like emergencies or changes to their schedules. It’s just the political ads, scams, and sales that need to be made illegal and punishable.
Utilities and such institutions that have your membership (library, gym, health care etc) should be welcome to use robocalling to notify you of useful info like emergencies or changes to their schedules
Those scenarios would be better handled through email or text message. Nothing that should be handled by a robocall is urgent enough to warrant disturbing people with a phone call, it should just be text or email.
An actual emergency call, requiring your immediate attention, should absolutely not be handled by robocalls. If it doesn’t require immediate attention, then a call is not necessary.
Just pick up the damn phone & call me!
-an elderly neighbor on his frustration with membership text messages from the aquarium
An organization being welcome to use something doesn’t mean it’s necessary for them to do it!
What do you think about national emergencies triggering automated calls to landlines?
What do you think about national emergencies triggering automated calls to landlines?
Well that is something that could require immediate action for your safety, so it could make sense. We have a nation-wide civil defense siren system where I live for that kind of stuff, which I believe is a much better solution than cold-calling people who may or may not even be within range of their land line.
Personally I want fewer text messages coming up on my mobile. I give a lot of places the landline number precisely to avoid them.
So you want to replace the 1-10 sms messages with robocalls? You want to receive 1-10 calls a day that is literally one-two lines of text?
They go to the landline which I ignore most all the time. Plus I don’t get 1-10 calls a day. If I did. I would definitely want to not be bothered by them coming in on my mobile.
Utilities and such institutions that have your membership (library, gym, health care etc) should be welcome to use robocalling to notify you of useful info like emergencies or changes to their schedules.
You want them to make texts they already send a robocall instead. These are literally your words. And since you never answer your landline by you own words, you never actually receive the content they’re sending. Why wouldn’t you instead rather they didn’t do either (sending automated texts and robocalls)?
I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that I want them to send texts. I don’t want unnecessary messages on my mobile phone, since it’s with me all the time, where I feel more compelled to look at it. I would rather they send a voicemail to my landline and I can listen to the message when I feel like it. Most of the time I’m working on my computer and I can hear the voicemail being recorded in the background, and that’s all I need. By using the landline I’m offloading relatively unimportant stuff away from the more distracting device, the mobile.
I personally find calls to be much more annoying and disruptive than a text I can just ignore.
The thing is, at this point, I’ve been so conditioned to ignore those kinds of calls, and immediately hang up if I accidentally pick one up, that I would probably miss the legitimate calls as well.
Since we have mail and text messages, robo alli g shlould be outlawed by Geneva Convention.
Thanks for that…
And how is this going to deter scammers?
It isn’t.
Scammers who are just recording their voice: “Oh ok we’re good”
The TCPA, a 1991 US law, bans the use of artificial or prerecorded voices in most non-emergency calls “without the prior express consent of the called party.”
Prerecorded calls are not allowed too.
Right, so in other words this will change absolutely nothing just like that 1991 law did.
I, Telemarker.
Ngl, it’s hard to get down a mountain on those things…
didn’t this happen a long time ago under Bill Clinton or something? what the fuck happened?
But, my car insurance? Who’s going to be telling me about the extended warranty?
I accidentally deleted that voice mail from the public benefits department a couple days ago and they haven’t called back yet ☹️
This has made me wonder… have any other europeans ever had problems with these?
I don’t recall ever having been called by a robot.
One of the reasons might be that a) robo calls are illegal here, and b) if someone uses them, they are easy to hunt down.
I once got some robocalls, all of the same makeup telling me I had won a car and should call a premium number to claim it (Ha!). I just reported those numbers to the local equivalent of the FCC, and they took it down within days.
We sometimes get weird scam-sms, but thats about it.
(We is my family, other people dont really talk about it with others that much)
Does this include google assistant making robocalls or answering my phone on my behalf? I sometimes use it to setup hair cut appointments.
Wait you can use Google Assistant to make calls? I just use it to filter out spam calls without answering.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Federal Communications Commission plans to vote on making the use of AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal.
A recent anti-voting robocall used an artificially generated version of President Joe Biden’s voice.
An analysis by the company Pindrop concluded that the artificial Biden voice was created using a text-to-speech engine offered by ElevenLabs.
As the FCC noted yesterday, the TCPA “restricts the making of telemarketing calls and the use of automatic telephone dialing systems and artificial or prerecorded voice messages.”
Rosenworcel said her proposed ruling will "recognize this emerging technology as illegal under existing law, giving our partners at State Attorneys General offices across the country new tools they can use to crack down on these scams and protect consumers.
“AI-generated voice cloning and images are already sowing confusion by tricking consumers into thinking scams and frauds are legitimate,” Rosenworcel said.
The original article contains 406 words, the summary contains 140 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
