It's the Year of the Robocall, it seems. I haven't noticed this directly, but a number of friends, colleagues, and internet posters seem to be inundated with bullshit phone calls now more than ever before.
What great times we live in, where anyone with an auto-dialer can blast out millions of calls to people who don't want to hear about scammy vacation offers or other nonsense.
If Gmail’s spam and newsletter filters are letting too much slip through, or if you use a private email service with a bad spam filter, then try this solution: quarantine all email until the sender has confirmed that they’re not spam. This is your homemade spam filter.
Despite being on the Do Not Call list, I've somehow managed to make it onto some sort of robocall list where a woman named "Ann" is trying to sell me insurance. Ann calls me at least a dozen times a day from numbers around the country (what a traveller!) to let me know about all the deals she has available. Whenever I stick around long enough to talk to a rep so I can ask them to stop calling me again, they immediately hang up on me. It's great.
Nobody likes having an inbox full of crap, and most services nowadays are good at filtering out obvious messages you shouldn't have to deal with, like those trying to extort you for money by teasing an even larger payout or those promising to increase the size of your chest and/or package.
As we've noted many times, Amazon is cluttered with fake reviews, and it takes work to sift through them. BuzzFeed dives deep into the economy of these fake reviews, which includes a subreddit tragically named /r/slavelabour. (The name is kind of a joke, but a very sad and true one.) The whole piece is just as depressing, as it basically spells out how utterly doomed Amazon reviews are.
If you get a text from Facebook, then you probably don't want to respond -- even if your response is something along the lines of "Stop texting me."
Does Facebook feel a little spammy to you these days? It always seems like my feed is full of posts from pages I don't follow, photos of friends I haven't talked to in years and most of all ads -- ads upon ads upon ads. To figure out if this was true or all in my head, I documented some of my News Feed to determine what type of posts Facebook's mysterious algorithm had decided were relevant to me, and figure out how spammy it really was.
The last time I checked my spam folder, I noticed a few messages included an unsubscribe link. Well that's nice, I thought. Maybe spammers realise that some people will never respond, so they want to trim their lists for efficiency. I clicked "unsubscribe". That was a mistake.
Somewhere along the way your mobile phone went from being a way for your friends and family to reach you, to becoming a portal through which marketers and spammers can bombard you with calls you're not interested in. It's sort of like the landline, only much, much more irritating. Here's what you can do to reclaim your device.
Your Facebook News Feed is about to change, yet again, and it's because the social media giant wants you to be better informed.
Twitter just added a new feature that lets you add a seemingly infinite number of people to a conversation without affecting the 140 character limit. You can, essentially, @ everyone at once. It's fine when it's just a few people tweeting back and forth, but more annoying tweeters can take advantage of the feature and blow up your notifications.
Dear Lifehacker, I have just tried to unsubscribe from a marketing email from a business who I'd previously bought some items from in-store. However, when I clicked the unsubscribe link it automatically subscribed me to another email marketing service. Since then I have been receiving at least one spam email every 20 minutes from the new list. Is there any recourse against this business for providing a dodgy unsubscribe link?
As long as there's money to be made in apps, there will be companies trying to inflate an app's rating by faking statistics. Now, Google's taking aim at developers who try to artificially push their app up in the Play Store rankings.
Android Nougat wants to keep you and spammy callers as far away from each other as possible. Now, when you block a number, it's blocked for all apps on your phone forever. However, it's a little quirky right now. Here's how it works.
It's almost impossible to completely block out email spam. That said, if you know who the biggest culprits are, you know a good place to start. Here are the companies that sent out the most spam emails last year.
Android: Google is just as sick of robocalls as you are, it seems. The company has just announced that the built-in phone app on Nexus phones will give you a big red warning when you're getting a call from a spammer.
Android: If you're getting swamped with unnecessary notifications, Android Lollipop has a built-in shortcut to cut down on that spam.
Hi Lifehacker, Just before the NSW election, I received an sms from Mike Baird about voting for him or something. I tried replying to the number but Android would crash every time -- I guess I wasn't the only person who was annoyed by this.
This is a very perverse kind of compliment: Australian online retailer Kogan is evidently now well-known enough for cyber-criminals to use it as bait in phishing emails.
