this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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My elderly mother has her phone locked down so that you can't contact her unless you're in her contacts.
We need to rethink how we let random people contact other random people. The upside of letting random people call anybody isn't that large, and the downside is like billions of damages in scams and people losing their retirements.
No. What we need is freaking DNS for phone numbers. I don't get why this isn't a thing.
So you can actually register a bunch of numbers under the same name. If
DoctorSocks.medcalls, you know it is them regradless whether it's the front desk or what not.If
DrJoana@DoctorSocks.medcalls, you know it's the number of that particular person.In that way you can even establish curated lists. On a govermental, but also on a community level.
That would help, but the bigger problem is that the trust model has inverted in a fairly short time. I'm in my 30s and I can remember a time where 80% of calls to a home phone were legitimate non sales calls, and cell phones were basically 100% legitimate. Those numbers have become about 90% illegitimate calls within about a decade, it's hard to train people that have lived for half their life or more with trustworthy calls to adapt to that.
Hello it's me Bill Gates at rnicrosoft.com I will help you do the needful to fix your device.
See. This is exactly what would not happen.
Because granny's phone white lists the curated list from her government, her family, and, well, her individual phone. Guess what? Rnicrosoft.com is not on there. Plus, it would not work like real DNS. It's merely an anology.
I mean there is something like that. It's called a phone number. Problem is, that the way it was thought out is not the way it works today.
(My knowledge is a few years old, so please correct me if I'm wrong) That said, the way it works is like this:
Your phone connects to your phone provider with your number and says: "Here I am, please route calls to me." Or "Please route this call to number XYZ." The provider then forwards it either to the next hop in the direction of XYZ or directly to XYZ's provider. In the end the call lands at XYZ's phone and the call begins. Great stuff.
But today it works a bit differently due to the way those companies "just trust" each other.
A malicious actor with a weird (malicious) provider just says: "This is my number, route a call to XYZ." And then just provides a wrong number and instead of stopping them, the provider just routes it. And all the other providers trust them and just route the call normally. If phone providers would just block list all traffic of malicious providers, all of this would last maybe a month and there would be no more scam calls from spoofed numbers. And afterwards providers could say to other providers "there is scam traffic coming from you with number XYZ, stop that or I won't route your traffic." and then call scams would just cease to exist in a year.
Even worse, malicious actors can register your number with one of those providers. Then the provider will tell the others and they will be like "well if you say so..." and just forward your calls to the wrong person.
(Yes, there is lots of wishful thinking in this comment, but let me dream of a better world)
Trump got rid of all of the protections that were already set up, very early on this term.
You can already do that with the ubiquitous vCard format.
Nope, this is not dynamic. If you call "DoctorSocks", you will reach them because it gets resolved for you. Not because you statically saved it on your device.
That really does depend on the person. My grandma can barely use email and doesn't know the difference between her Contacts app and Gmail, nor does she even understand how to add a contact. She'd just accidentally isolate herself from people without realizing, and would also never get any of the phone calls she gets from her bank, charities and organizations she works for, etc.
Those examples you mentioned aren't random people. They're people she knows and organizations that she associates with. I am suggesting that we rethink the system to specifically disallow randos.
Have you ever had food (or package and furniture even) delivery where they need to call, or gotten a call from a pharmacy, or had to call a plumber, or lost a pet? There’s tons of reasons why people need to call a random person.
It makes sense to have the option to lock down a phone to just contacts, like for kids and the elderly, but not for everyone.
For me it's calls from medical professionals regarding my wife. There's no way to know ahead of time the entire list of numbers all of these organizations - each facility, each provider, each insurer, each pharmacy.
Definitely! And if you’re someone’s emergency contact, forget about it.
I'd love to know what people who set their phone to auto ignore anyone not on their contacts are missing. Just last week I had two random calls from new to me numbers that were actually calls I wanted to take.
Spam calls are annoying but only take a second to figure out what they are and I can choose whether I want to engage and waste their time or save my own by just hanging up. Though I don't get many lately, not sure if it's Canada improving its phone system or my own phone's filtering (I've seen people mention pixels do well filtering but I'm on graphene so no idea if that applies to me).
Also on Graphene. I'm unemployed and dealing with a semi recent health diagnosis, so I definitely get calls from numbers that I haven't saved. I just let them go to voicemail, and if they're not spam, I save the number and call them back.
If you're hot, then giving randos your phone number is a recipe for stalkers.
Everyone should have multiple phone numbers, each with expiration dates that vary according to how long you expect to interact with them: 1 day for food delivery, 1 month for dating, 1 year for classmates, coworkers, or family. 10 years for close friends.
People and organizations that:
That's why I'm saying it isn't for everyone. Sure, maybe you can find someone that does have a bank, medical providers, insurance providers, etc, that uses only one number for all phone-based communication and uses no third-parties, but that's not the norm, so for her, that would result in constantly missing bills, follow-up texts, fraud alerts, customer service callbacks, etc.
Again, my suggestion was that we rethink the system, not that we keep the current system exactly as it is except that everybody locks down their cell phones. If we rethink the system, then those examples you thought of would be use cases for contacting people under the new system.
That's why the STIR/SHAKEN attestation was setup for VOIP.
It basically adds a layer of trust and verification that the person placing the call owns the number that is being used in the caller ID. It helps prevent random calls from being transmitted from random numbers, one of the reasons it's almost impossible to prevent scam calls right now.
But it's not enforced system wide, and we don't have legislature that is making a point to deal with these scam and junk calls.
I considered doing this, but then the Pixel phones started doing a much better job at just filtering out spam calls so it hasn't really been an issue.
I've been saying for decades we need to switch phones to a white-list by default contact restriction.
Only approved numbers can get through. Contact should require consent.
Does your mom not have any doctors?
She can simply save her doctors as contacts
I’m jealous that you have never been sick in any way. That’s very literally not how the medical system works.
Did you save the phone number for the lab that processed your blood work most recently? It’s not the phone number of the people you gave the blood to, they passed it off to somebody else.
Do you save the phone number of the people that did your x-ray in the doctor’s office? It’s actually an independent contractor with a different patient notification system.
Oh by the way the pharmacy technician called you from the local branch line instead of the head office. Guess you aren’t getting your meds this month.
In no world should the technicians be contacting you about the results lol they should send the results to your doctor
No, i live in the 21. century and all that is done digitally. The only calls that are coming are pre-arranged
You might live in the 21st century.... But medicine still runs on fax machines
In the US. Not in the 21st century.
That system really sounds tedious.
Here blood results are sent to your "Hausarzt" (some doctor near you who you always go to for smaller stuff but also things like this) so he can decide what you should do (he knows you better than some random company).
X-Rays are instantly discussed with you (instantly may include waiting for an hour in the hospital). Sometimes additionally also sent to your "Hausarzt".
Pharmacies simply do offer your meds, if they have trouble getting them they contact other pharmacies but that was only the case during covid.
(And all that is paid for in tax money)
Pharmacies definitely sometimes need to order meds. Though often they just give you a date. It's impossible to always have every niche medication in stock. But if number whitelisting became common, it just wouldn't be an issue bc they would give all the relevant numbers to every customer.
In the US, somehow, all your doctor calls' are made through the insurance's phone. (i guess)