Hey, have you Heard that your car’s extended warranty is about to expire? That’s what the monstrous cyborg voice on the other end of the line wants you to think, anyway. Fortunately, these constant spam calls may soon become less frequent.
This week, the US Federal Communications Commission closed a loophole in its policy requiring voice service providers to comply with a standard that could help block automated calls. All service providers in the United States are now required to use a technology known as Stir/Shaken (an acronym for very title is long and difficult to use of the federal standards for calls). It’s a way to identify legitimate service providers and allow them to connect calls, while stopping those trying to spam you.
Major service providers used this standard when the FCC published this policy last year. But there is an exception for landlines and companies with less than 100,000 customers. Turns out, a surprising number of spam calls are filtered through those smaller companies, and this week, FCC said it requires everyone to adhere to the Stir/Shake standard regardless of size.
Like Ars Technica shown, it’s not a perfect plan, and it won’t eliminate spam calls completely. The Stir/Shaken standard doesn’t work on landlines, so old scammers can still make calls to homes. Also, this standard only applies to the US, so anyone spoofing a phone number abroad can find a way around this. And it’s still your responsibility to get some really weird cheats through text. In the meantime, our best advice is, when in doubt, don’t get involved — even if your car is actually under warranty. To be about to expire.
Here’s some more nifty news.
Insta-Delete
If you’re an iPhone user who has at one point decided you’re all done with Instagram, it can be a little difficult to actually delete your account. You can’t do that in the app itself; you must log in via a web browser instead. You can now delete your Instagram account on iOS right there in the app.
The move comes in response to a new policy Apple rolled out on the App Store on Thursday, which requires any app that requires users to create an account to provide them with a way to end it. It’s still not a clean break, at least not immediately. The app tries to instruct you to “deactivate” the account instead of deleting it, which will leave it in a suspended state. And if you really, really delete it, there is still a 30-day grace period before the account is completely deleted, and if you log back in, it will automatically restore the account. It sounds like… delete Facebook.
Speaking of, did you know you can delete your Facebook account also?
Like every other app, TikTok’s All About Shopping Now
Get ready to buy more things in TikTok. Last year, TikTok Cooperate with Shopify to allow creators to sell merchandise on the platform. Now it’s testing a feature to show that store features more prominently in the app.
TechCrunch unearthed screenshot of Store preferences, it looks like it allows people to flip through product categories and add items to the cart right within the app. The Store tab is prominently displayed, at the top of TikTok’s main Follow and For You tabs.
