this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.