Hi, have you heard that your car’s extended warranty is about to expire? At least that’s what the robot voice on the other end of the phone wants you to think. Fortunately, these incessant spam calls may soon become less frequent.
This week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission closed a loophole in a policy that requires voice service providers to adhere to a standard that would help block robo calls. All carriers in the United States are now required to use a technology known as Stir / Shaken (an acronym for a very long and unwieldy title of federal standards for calls). It’s a way to identify legitimate operators and allow them to connect calls while blocking those who try to spam you.
The major airlines had already used the standard when the FCC announced this policy last year. But there was an exception for landlines and companies with fewer than 100,000 customers. It turns out that a surprising number of spam calls are being filtered through the smaller businesses, and this week The FCC said it requires everyone to adhere to the Stir / Shaken standard regardless of size.
As Ars Technica points out, it is not a perfect plan and it will not completely eliminate spam calls. The Stir / Shaken standard does not work on landlines, so old-fashioned scammers can still make house calls. The standard also applies only in the United States, so anyone who spoofs numbers abroad could find a way around it. And you can still get some really weird scams via text. In the meantime, our best advice when in doubt is to not get involved – even if your car’s warranty is real. is by expiration.
Here is some more gadgety news.
Insta-Slet
If you are an iPhone user who at one point decided that you were completely done with Instagram, it was probably a bit of a challenge to actually delete your account. You could not do that in the app itself; instead you had to log in via a web browser. Now it is possible to delete your Instagram account on iOS right there in the app.
The move comes in response to a new policy that Apple implemented in its App Store on Thursday, which requires that any app that asks users to create an account also gives them a way to end it. It’s still not a clean break, at least not right away. The app tries to control you to “disable” the account instead of deleting it, which would just put it in a suspended state. And if you actually, actually delete it, there is still a 30-day grace period before the account is completely deleted, and if you log in again, it will automatically restore the account. It sounds a lot like deleting Facebook.
Speaking of which, did you know that you can also delete your Facebook account?
Like any other app, TikTok is about shopping now
Get ready to buy more stuff in TikTok. Last year, TikTok the collaboration with Shopify to let creators sell merchandise on the platform. Now it is testing a feature to show these store features more prominently in the app.
TechCrunch uncovered screenshots of the Shop setting, which seems to allow people to browse product categories and add items to a shopping cart directly in the app. The store tab appears prominently, at the top with TikTok’s primary Following and For You tabs.