Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy".

When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy".

And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't do that because they prefer to collect a few cents a call from them rather than serve their customers better. It's everyone else who needs this.

They're not intercepting calls over their network from suspected bad actors; rather, they've created some phone numbers that always go to Daisy - see https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/virgin-media-o...

Ah! So step 2 is wait for the spammers to automate blacklisting of Daisy phone numbers, and only then start rolling out a (paid) Daisy option to customers.

Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe Daisy does.

If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.

My friend works for a big telco and is the guy fixing this problem for them. They have amazing powers of deception when they need it. New numbers can be conjured up at any time.

The new fad among wireless carriers here in the US is to route what they think are spam calls to a fake voicemail box.

Voicemail that is left in this generic voice mail box never makes it to their customer and the customer is completely unaware that some of their calls have been diverted.

Then suddenly, calls from consenting callers to consenting receivers are labeled as spam and blocked. What can you do about it? Nothing. Switch to email, I guess. Oh wait, same problem.

You sound like an advocate for telemarketers. Am I correct?

I doubt very seriously that the pool of people who have knowingly and intentionally and explicitly opted in/consented to telemarketing - that is, without any dark pattern involvement and with a clear and unmbiguous consent experience, is very large. In fact I think it is infinitesimal because I can’t recall seeing such a consent UX- they ALL involve dark patterns. And if you pair that with “marketer who diligently implements all state & FTC requirements and does timely and accurate processing of removal requests, I think that the 3 relationships left are web app UX testers.

I think the world would be a better place without telemarketing or email marketing. Maybe a “one email per year” limit per merchant who you have actually paid money to and not opted out of.

I’m not OP, but my worry is about the false positives. I have real inbound calls and emails getting detected as spam all the time. Luckily my VoIP provider has a spam box I can look in, but at this point I just have to go through them every so often to make sure I’m not missing anything important.

If the telecoms can perfectly predict the telemarketers, then I’d love it. But in practice how often is this going to block people I know from calling me? Probably not never, and then we just have to give up on phones as a reliable method of communication.