A Visible customer was recently the victim of what seems to be a misunderstanding of the company’s automated spam detection system. According to the user, after working with customer service to reactivate an account, the response from the company alleged that the deactivation was due to the account being flagged for excessive text messaging — or spam, as that is against the company’s terms and conditions.
However, there is one problem: the user states this wasn’t spam, but rather they were responding “STOP” to a barrage of unsolicited political messages. This situation has highlighted a potential conflict between automated spam detection systems and legitimate user responses, especially in the context of increasing political text messaging.
Weird that their system doesn’t flag the flood of political spam, if all it takes is one person replying stop a few times
Typically something like a political campaign will use a dedicated texting service intended to send out mass texts. They’re not copy/pasting them on a consumer level cell phone account.
Geez, I wonder why…
There might be laws against it like there is for mail?
For instance, you can’t opt out of mail from your member of parliament here, nor political ads that happen around election.
Hindsight is 20/20 but this could have been avoided by just not replying and blocking the number instead. Replying “STOP” just verifies that it’s a good phone number and that you’re reading their texts. Then they collect that information and sell it to other spammers.
Problem with that is there may be other services that also leverage the same short code, meaning you may be blocking something you need in the future.
Edit: apparently according to Twilio:
Shared short codes are not permitted in the US and Canada or in most countries worldwide.
The only (very narrow) exception to the prohibition on shared short codes that is permitted by US/Canada carriers is a short code that sends OTP (one-time passwords) or authentication codes with strict adherence to a template, and no option for customization by the brands that are sharing the short code.
Exactly what I do. Don’t respond and I just block and report.
I do the same for phone calls from unknown numbers. I just press the volume button to mute the ringer and let it time out. If you hang up or pickup you get added to the list as active.
I’ve been using the ‘Silence’ app, which lets only known-callers ring your phone. The rest get sent straight to voicemail
I use that app to block area codes near my phone number since I moved far away from where I lived when I got this number.
Yup, same for me
Android has a feature where you can just ignore an incoming call. It doesn’t hang up it just stops playing the ringtone and goes back to the home screen.
Pretty sure that’s what happens when you hit the volume button
On iPhone it’s just pressing any of the volume buttons once. It will mute the ringer and let it go to voicemail.
Same on Android.
I’m pretty sure the US has a law that requires people to stop texting you after you send STOP. Additionally, service providers like Amazon will just remove subscriptions if they receive a STOP.
That would be really useful if the people behind these texts were subject to US laws.
Or STOP meant “stop,” not “yes daddy give me more texts”
the US has a law
Laws? What about them? We don’t follow laws here anymore.
To be fair, we only selectively enforced them before. And now we selectively enforce… worse shit.
Can’t remember ever hearing about spam calls being prosecuted. And judging by the volume I think its fair to assume they never are.
Yes but they’re all based in India so it doesn’t matter.
90% of mine are local.
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Just because the number is local doesn’t mean the caller is.
I didn’t say that. I’m telling you the caller is local.
Relevance?
This is Not the Onion territory.
If only we had regulations…
Send goatse and block.
