Cutline Speaks

May I ask who’s calling?

posted by Michael on October 22, 2008

Full disclosure: If you call me on my mobile, and I don't recognize your number, chances are I'm not going to answer. I probably won't be in much of a hurry to listen to your voicemail, either. It's not that I think I'm too cool for school (well, at least not where answering the phone is concerned). It's just that I've been using the same cell number as my primary line for quite some time now, and that number has in turn been added to all kinds of marketing lists and user profiles and even press releases over the years. Sometimes the calls from unfamiliar numbers turn out to be legit; most of the time they're spam. So I mostly ignore them.

But yesterday I was out of the office for a couple of hours, running some errands. And when I'm away from my desk during business hours, I try to answer more of the calls I get, just in case someone's having trouble tracking me down. So just as I'm leaving a building, a call comes in from an unfamiliar number with a San Francisco area code. I hesitate for a moment, and then pick up. Turns out to be a robocall, featuring a celebrity who happens to annoy me making ridiculous claims about a public figure I happen to think a lot of. Ugh.

So what are we supposed to do about this kind of thing? Isn't there some kind of cool technology out there that can do for spam on phones what Gmail has done for email? Funny you should ask -- check out this post to Slashdot from earlier today, detailing a technology called TrueCall that can screen calls on your home line. And there are other cool products out there that can be used for similar purposes, like GrandCentral and SpinVox. Doesn't sound like any of these solutions are perfect, but the early adopters I know are generally pretty happy with them.

How do you filter out phone spam? Weigh in with your comments below.

Tags for this post: pr