The FCC wants to criminalize AI robocall spam

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/02/fcc_ai_robocall/

by mikece • 2 years ago

229 138 2 years ago

interbased• 2 years ago

Current laws require telemarketers to have explicit consent from consumers before they can make automated calls using "an artificial or prerecorded" voice. Rosenworcel believes the same rules should apply for AI-generated robo-calls too.

I'm confused by this part. How is AI not already included the current law of "artificial or prerecorded"?

AdamJacobMuller2• 2 years ago

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today proposed that the FCC recognize calls made with AI-generated voices are “artificial” voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA),

The FCC chair here is not saying "we should make a new law saying AI is artificial and illegal for robocalls" but saying "in our opinion AI calls are already classed as artificial under this well-tested law. Please go out and sue some people under the TCPA, here are tools to do that and we'll support your efforts in doing so."

Basically the FCC thinks the existing law covers it, but, it hasn't been tested in a court yet.

advisedwang• 2 years ago

Unless I'm reading it wrong, the TCPA does not define or allow the FCC to define a crime. It's purely a civil action. So the headline is misleading.

6DM• 2 years ago

Doubt it will do anything to curb the current level of spam, not to mention its transitioning from calls to text, now that people have learned to just not answer their phone.

AdamJacobMuller2• 2 years ago

A2P/10DLC registration seems to have curbed SMS spam for me significantly. As annoying as it was to comply with, I think it's useful (so far?)

NoPedantsThanks• 2 years ago

What is that?

dylan604• 2 years ago

I think it just comes in waves. Since the beginning of the year, I've received more spam texts and calls being silenced by my phone than I did all of last year.

SoftTalker3• 2 years ago

All my "unknown sender" texts get filtered to a separate view, and do not create a notification. If I'm expecting a text from an unknown number (such as a 2FA code) I'll just open the "Unknown Senders" view. The rest of the unknown messages are ignored.

pasc18782• 2 years ago

Unfortunately on iPhone you can't set some messages to unknown sender and some spam calls seem to be in known senders

binarysolo• 2 years ago

I remember a time when I'd pick up every single call received... now it's the opposite, I only have it ring on recognized phone numbers + I skim voicemails, filter out the ones that leave the 3-4s of silence or autoplay text, and call back those who actually have business purpose with me.

If there exist AI robocalls that start spoofing my friends and loved ones... ugh, I can just imagine the hassle of doing due diligence for every voicemail going forward. (This does kinda remind me of the scams where someone pretends to be a kidnapped distant family member, cries in the background of the call, and asks for ransom money....)

SoftTalker3• 2 years ago

Same. If you're not already in my address book, I'm not answering your call. I don't have voice mail set up either.

ghaff4• 2 years ago

That's not realistic for many people. I don't have every doctor's office that I might come in contact with in my contact database. Nor every emergency service that may contact me because of an elderly relative or someone else. And presumably you don't have a landline either so you're simply choosing to make yourself not contactable.

Which isn't a reasonable option for a lot of people assuming there are alternatives.

hiddencost• 2 years ago

Android has a call screening feature that's amazing. I turn it on for any unknown number. I haven't missed any calls I wanted to receive, and everything else fails the screen.

webninja4• 2 years ago

Hopefully that doesn’t filter out important calls from unknown numbers too like job offers.

criddell6• 2 years ago

Is it difficult for the carriers or the phone makers to determine if a message is empty, and if so, delete it? This should be an option I can turn on.

dahart• 2 years ago

Meh feels like something without teeth that won’t really help. I’d rather see the FCC require telcos & celcos to require caller authentication so that spam calls can be traced to their source and cannot be anonymous, and so that spammers can no longer spoof numbers. I’m cynical about this and I’d love to be wrong, but get the feeling the FCC doesn’t dare to do things that will make a real difference, or worse, actively looks the other way, since the service providers make money on spam calling and will throw a fit if regulation gets in the way of their profits.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39220462

teeray• 2 years ago

If a carrier delivers a spam text or call, if they can’t definitively prove who sent it, it should be treated as though the carrier themselves sent it (and fined accordingly). Watch how fast telcos mandate authentication and other KYC measures after that.

hackideiomat• 2 years ago

I don't want that?

partitioned• 2 years ago

How is this a better world than getting spam calls

torstenvl2• 2 years ago

How is it not? It'll cut down on spam and other antisocial behavior (e.g., unsolicited intimate images).

viraptor4• 2 years ago

I'm not sure why you want to connect that fine to kyc-style behaviour. Just apply the first part and fines. Essentially "you pay the fine unless you can forward it to the entity that originated the call". That would solve the issue just fine.

Telcos already know where the connections come from and who to bill for what. Someone just needs to mandate it.

acdha2• 2 years ago

I would structure that differently: the telco pays the fine immediately, but can collect with damages from the source. That ensures that consumers are compensated without delay and gives the telco a strong incentive to be serious about collecting and/or blocking anyone without a robust legal presence. Most of the problem goes back to the decision in the VoIP era that checking ID would slow revenue growth so that needs to be robustly corrected.

perlgeek• 2 years ago

This might work for domestic calls, but what about international ones? Do you really want to force telcos to block all calls from countries that you cannot collect fines from?

malka• 2 years ago

They can collect the fine themselve, by billing it to the other country operator.

viraptor4• 2 years ago

The US market is big enough to essentially cause its own "Brussels effect". (It already did in other areas) If the choice for some external telco is "deal with spam or lose access to call the US", any legit company will choose the first one. Or they can follow the same fine collection rules themselves.

CoastalCoder2• 2 years ago

Do you really want to force telcos to block all calls from countries that you cannot collect fines from?

I'd suggest it be optional on a per-customer basis, perhaps with a whitelist.

E.g., the only international calls I ever want to receive comes from family members' cell phones when they're traveling.

I'm 100% okay with blocking all other international calls. If something is that important, they can send me something via mail, FedEx, etc., or send a message courier to my house.

bluGill5• 2 years ago

Most countries will not have a problem with it since they want to have the correct data anyway and are not a source of SPAM. The countries that are not fine with it are countries most of the US doesn't want to deal with anyway.

Just make it so you can opt-in to an exception and nobody will care. If you live in the EU and want to call me (as if you know my number, and have reason to call me) you won't have a problem. If you live in Russia you might have a problem - but I have no reason to think anyone in Russia will ever call me so I don't care. The few people who do have friends in Russia can add an exceptions and those exceptions are not enough for spammers to bother operating at all anymore.

lupusreal• 2 years ago

I'd love if receiving international calls only worked on an opt-in basis, maybe opting in for each originating country. I think most people in America would have no reason to opt-in. Of course, American corps using overseas call centers would be inconvenienced, but screw them anyway.

acdha2• 2 years ago

Yes. They don’t peer with every other company in the world directly so it would be written into the existing contracts between the major companies, who would collect from their smaller peers.

This already works: a staple of these threads is some European user who has sender-pays service expressing surprise that this is a problem because it’s so rare in their experience. Those countries can still receive international calls.

burnished4• 2 years ago

I imagine instead of blocking you'd see peering agreements with very stringent terms around allowable portion of calls fined as spam.

dredmorbius6• 2 years ago

This is one of the views I'm coming to.

I'd also suggest that there be a rebate per spam call delivered. Say, $10/call to the customer.

Telcos could seek 10x that from the upstream who peered the call.

That is, there's a protection and credit to both the end-recipient and the telco provider, which might make the politics of such policy or legislation more widely palatable.

UniverseHacker2• 2 years ago

I want emails, phone calls, and texts sent to me to cost the sender some fixed amount of money… which is refunded only if I send a return token confirming it was not spam. For previous contacts or people in my organizations this refund would be automatic.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

Honestly? This

The American phone pricing model, charging for "airtime" is absurd

It means that a spammer can pay $10 for 1000s of calls while the same customer receiving the call pays much more than that per minute

It is frankly ridiculous

n0us• 2 years ago

They would just jack up prices to account for the additional costs and then they would never actually pay you that $10

pwg• 2 years ago

if they can’t definitively prove who sent it,

They already can. There's an internal "billing" code for every call so carrier knows who to bill for having carried that call.

They don't want to "prove who sent it" because all those billing transactions for carrying those calls add up to significant profit, and they don't want to kill that profit if they don't have to.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

This is literally the 'carrier liability exemption' that section 230 is based on, HN gets all up in arms whenever carrier liability is threatened to be taken from internet sites...

webninja4• 2 years ago

Should just apply to Telcos over a certain subscriber size. So, the Big 3 only. Don’t want to squash new competition into the market with new regulations.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

They barely scraped thru human spam, they better ban this sht

joshstrange• 2 years ago

Can they make it criminal to send spam SMS as well? I get multiple sms from political candidates (that I didn't sign up for, in fact if they address me by name it's the wrong name) every day. They always come from a new number so blocking doesn't work. Responding "STOP" doesn't work either since they hop numbers constantly and ignore stops. There is no way to stop the barrage of text messages and it's driving me insane.

hsbauauvhabzb4• 2 years ago

In australia, political messages are exempt from anti spam and anti junk mail laws.

Politicians think they’re above everyone else, which evidently in this case they’re literally above the law.

eastbound• 2 years ago

I’ve had Amnesty International contacting me at work, using the “exemption for humanitarian emergencies” to say “We can’t remove you from mail lists, it’s a humanitarian emergency.” Highly annoying to be doxxed by who you’ve been donating to.

Actually, there is a solution: Say that you are back in Europe and a EU citizen. The GDPR applies to them too.

JoshTriplett• 2 years ago

Same in the US: politicians get an exception from the Do Not Call list and similar. Complete garbage.

maccard4• 2 years ago

In the UK, there is a growing group of people who voted for Brexit who are now claiming that they were not informed of what was going to happen.

The UK government sent a white paper to every household with their opinion on it. If there wasn't a special case for this, many households wouldn't have received this. these things can be abused, but paraphrasing patio11 "the optimal amount of fraud(/abuse) is non-zero" [0]. The argument for this applies in this case to.

[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Lendal2• 2 years ago

The same laws benefit you as well as politicians. You can pick up the phone, call your neighbor, and discuss politics at any time without fear of reprisal from the authorities. Try doing this in Cuba or China, you will end up in prison. In my view, every citizen in a democratic country is not only permitted to but obligated to participate in the political process, which is why political activity is exempted. If you don't want to participate, if you don't vote, or inform yourself of issues, you still benefit from all the same freedoms & protections of the law as those who do participate.

This is an important point, because the exemption of political activity is due to the protections of political speech. Imagine if it were not this way, the party in power could simply fine or even arrest their opponents for trying talk to people over the phone. This happens every day in nondemocratic countries. This protection should not extend to AI though. AI doesn't vote. AI doesn't have a voice in a democracy. So allowing AI to benefit from this exemption should not be permitted. I tolerate PEOPLE calling me, because I am a voter and they are voters and we must all discuss the direction our laws should go or who our representatives should be (when we have time). But AI should have no place in the political process. Not for robocalls, not for choosing representatives, and especially not for lawmaking.

JohnFen2• 2 years ago

Same in the US, unfortunately.

criddell6• 2 years ago

This has been driving me crazy too. I don’t know how but I got on some Democrat list and they won’t leave me alone. Is there some central database they use that I can ask to be removed from?

aendruk• 2 years ago

It’s so bad, and egregiously dishonest at times, that I half suspect it’s actually a campaign to earn a red vote out of spite.

lcvw• 2 years ago

There is a legal loophole campaigns use where if a text message was sent by a human it’s not considered spam. So of course a program exists that dispatches the message you want to send to a call center and they dial the thousands of numbers you want by hand.

doener• 2 years ago

Previous link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39218669

alkonaut3• 2 years ago

Why were Robocalls allowed to begin with, back when they were taped messages? From the beginning you couldn't screen calls to your home (no called ID) so it must have been infuriating to get up from the couch to answer a robocall?

If regulation had been sane from the beginning maybe this discussion wouldn't be necessary (I can't imagine robocalls are legal in many other places? I haven't gotten one in my entire life).

b112• 2 years ago

Before the big Ma Bell split up, due to them being a monopoly, even local calls were often charged.

And long distance rates were horrible, and there were none of these independents.

Back then, there wasn't a reason, because such call devices cost hard cash per call. And it's really only gotten super bad the last decade.

Karellen2• 2 years ago

Why were Robocalls allowed to begin with,

Because money. Duh.

alkonaut3• 2 years ago

I don’t follow. Companies don’t vote but voters have to answer robocalls.

bluGill5• 2 years ago

They were a loophole nobody expected so they didn't mitigate it. Robocalls would not have been affordable in the 1970s as long distance rates were so high - you would have needed to setup a call center in each city you target as long distance rates between cities was hundreds of dollars per hour. That means pay big city labor rates not cheap foreign labor.

Only with IP calling is calling from country to country cheap enough that robocalls can be worth doing.

iancmceachern5• 2 years ago

They need to ban the software and equipment that let's them make the calls.

AgentOrange1234• 2 years ago

I don't see how that would work? Isn't this all general purpose stuff at this point?

iancmceachern5• 2 years ago

The ingredients to make an explosive are too, but we've made that illegal, I think we can figure out something

criddell6• 2 years ago

It would be nice if we could hold the carriers responsible. If they have to start paying penalties from allowing spammers on their network, things might change.

viraptor4• 2 years ago

Software which allows robocalls is ~10 lines of code these days. You can't ban that idea. You can create your own in under an hour if you've dealt with VoIP systems before.

iancmceachern5• 2 years ago

Making an explosive device or 3d printing a gun is similarly easy, but illegal

iancmceachern5• 2 years ago

Lock picks are just some metal wire, but are illegal unless your a locksmith to carry around.

emsign• 2 years ago

Thank you! I welcome this.

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

I never get robocalls on my private phone, but probably get 2-3 a day on my work phone.

Most are easy to detect, simply because they're foreign numbers.

What is worse, are the spoofed numbers. Because it could be related to work, I have to answer those.

I've lost count how many times I've called someone back, mere seconds after missing the call, only to get some frustrated person on the other end:

"I'm so sorry, people have been calling me all day, asking why I've tried to call them"

"I don't know why my phone number is being used for this"

"What, I didn't call you? You must have the wrong number"

etc.

Lendal2• 2 years ago

This is specifically about AI-generated voices you'd recognize, like spoofing Joe Biden's or Nancy Pelosi's voice, for example.

Asmod4n• 2 years ago

I still wonder why this isn’t a problem in Germany, i get at most one spam call per year.

coldpie2• 2 years ago

Here's some clues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

msoad2• 2 years ago

As someone who lived in the US and now in Germany I just want to tell my American friends that this is not a problem in Germany as far as I know. My German number never gets any spam calls and my friends never talk about spam calls. It's the corporate greed that gets in the way of doing the right thing over there...

mschuster91• 2 years ago

It's not like us Germans are free from scams... we have Turkish callcenters who scam dozens of millions of euros [1].

[1] https://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/hallo-muenchen/callcenter-b...

msoad2• 2 years ago

I believe you, scam is everywhere. What you experience in the US is different. In the news article you sent it's obviously something that they could track down and sentence the fraudsters to jail. In the US you get multiple calls from those robo-callers per day and you practically can't do nothing about it. This is why Apple added "mute unknown callers" to iPhones. This is the best strategy most people have at this point.

sumtechguy• 2 years ago

That could be selection bias. Not something that the telcos did.

Many of these scams are run out of India and Nigeria. They teach English as a second language fairly young. That lets them cheaply target English speaking countries. I am not saying it is because of that but if I was running a scam center (I am already looking for 'the easy way') I am not targeting something where the pool of people I draw from need to know another language. One scambaiting call I watched they had gave the person running the scam had a laptop from about 10 years ago with 4GB of RAM and a very low spec processor. In other words cheap and easy to get. Low monetary risk with high monetary reward.

The core issue is the system allows spoofing and poor verification of who is getting blocks of numbers. Also low enforcement of laws in originating countries. The laws actually force the telcos to sort of do this too. As they in many cases must route. But the reality is we have bad actors that we do not want to route. But that same tool to not route could be used for reasons like what many tech companies currently use to get rid of people they do not like for whatever reason.

throw10920• 2 years ago

It's the corporate greed that gets in the way of doing the right thing over there...

That's absolutely bonkers. "Corporate greed" is a fuzzy, unprovable, politically-charged and highly unlikely to actually be true catchphrase that means nothing. The fault lies with the US government - there's nothing that prevents it from acting in the interests of their representatives and implementing anti-spam laws, like you did in Germany. There's no difference between German companies and US companies that somehow makes one "greedier" than the other, either. This comment is a nothingburger that, quite honestly, does not belong on HN.

bithead• 2 years ago

I'm on the federal do-not-call list. Isn't it $500 per call, and $1500 if they don't give a business address when asked? I get at least 6 per day on average. Occasionally I don't get any.

I stopped answering my phone a the 12 per day peak. I figure if it's really important they'll leave a message.

djbusby• 2 years ago

I'm not in any list and get like zero per day. One a week maybe. How am I so lucky?

coldpie2• 2 years ago

Isn't it $500 per call, and $1500 if they don't give a business address when asked?

Sure. How should they collect that from the overseas scammers who called you?

Internationally sourced calls should be opt-in, this would solve the non-political portion of the spam problem. Almost no one needs to receive calls from overseas.

b8• 2 years ago

I still get invalid number calls sometimes and I use Google's PixelAI screening. It doesn't even show me the option to screen the call manually. Also, if a robocaller calls twice then they bypass my Pixel's screening feature.

ongytenes• 2 years ago

I use to prank the telemarketers but unable to with robo callers. One a woman called wanting me to switch long distance carriers. I halfway listened to her spill for twenty minutes while watching TV. Finally she wanted me to switch. Told her I couldn't for I was house sitting. She asked about my home number. Told her I only had a beeper. She asked me why I let her talk so long. Told her she had such a lovely voice and I enjoyed listening to it. She slammed the phone down on me.

AlwaysRock• 2 years ago

For years I got a spam call every morning during my commute to work. I found Lenny the automated old person who would keep callers on the line from anywhere from 2-20 minutes.

It really was fun listening to callers freak out when they realized what was happening.

kova12• 2 years ago

I would applaud if FCC goes even further, and bans the robots from use in any business, which is required to accept calls

For example: government forces me to have health insurance, and health insurance is unable to satisfy my needs online - DON'T FORCE ME TALK TO YOUR ROBOTS. These don't typically recognize my voice, and frankly speaking "How can we help you? You can say anything" sounds like an insult to me. Many of the businesses don't even offer touch-tone navigation anymore. It used to be that "Say blablabla, blablabla, or blablabla" meant you could use "1", "2", or "3" respectively, but now even that is no longer working in many cases.

Hire f*ng human, or don't offer phone line at all.

n4jm4• 2 years ago

See "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act."

robomartin• 2 years ago

The solution to this problem doesn't have to be complex at all.

Conceptually (meaning, all details are not covered here):

  - The caller/message-sender pays a per-call fee
      - For example, $1.00 flat fee
  - If the caller is in your address book, the charge is $0
  - If you call them back, the charge is $0
  - If you approve the caller, the charge is $0
  - The person receiving the call earns a portion of the fee (30% ?)
  - Etc.

If implemented correctly, on average, no legitimate caller pays this extra per-call or per-message fee. Machine learning could be used to augment effectiveness and reduce or eliminate fees when two people or entities know each other.

For example, a company receives tons of customer service calls. Most callers might be unknown to the company (think Amazon customer service). There has to be a mechanism through which callers don't get stuck with a $1 fee just for calling to get support. This is where a detailed design of this type of a solution would be necessary.

What this does do, I think, is create a situation where it would (should) cost spammers millions of dollars to reach millions of people with unwanted calls or messages.

Another element of this is that consumers would make money from these stupid calls or texts. They should. If someone wants to consume somebody else's time, they should pay for it.

Which brings-up another twist to this idea:

Maybe people should be able to set a rate for unsolicited calls or messages. I could, for example, set my rate to $10 per minute and a 15 minute minimum. If you call me and I don't know you, the cost to talk to me or leave a message is a minimum of $150. If I call you back, the charge is negated. I can also tell the system not to charge you. Etc.

Upon making a call, the caller hears:

  "This number charges a $150 for anonymous calls.  Press 1 to accept."

If it is a message, they receive a reply:

  "This number charges a $150 for anonymous messages.  Reply YES to accept."

The receiver gets a pop-up that might say:

  "Unknown caller: <insert name or number>."
  "Accept and charge $150 fee"
  "Accept and charge $0"
  "Cancel"

Details would have to be worked out, of course. There are lots of ways to implement something like this such that legitimate callers are not charged any fees. Legislation and a technical infrastructure would be required to drive such a system.

The reason this nonsense persists is because the cost is low and potential return on investment is high. If that equation is flipped, the nonsense stops.

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

He he he, because it's AI and new and shiny and they want to be seen actually doing something by the public eye.

Where have they been all this time that regular spam calls have been a thing lmao

webninja4• 2 years ago

I keep hearing this same news story but nothing is happening. Maybe if this doesn’t get enough momentum, finding the phone numbers of the FCC chairmen and telecom company presidents and signing them up for spam would do the trick. It’s one of those things that would aggravate one person but would benefit the rest of the country.

The FCC wants to criminalize AI robocall spam

Related Stories