This part of the presentation reallllly bothered me. What a bunch of time wasting nothings and filled with establishing your "brand" and ego.
Sorry, but I do not want to see someone's Self advertising everytime I get a phone call. You know this will be used to show you ads when companies call, right? You think this will not be monetized?
Although it’s the least used app for many of us, with iOS 17, the Phone app will be upgraded with a feature Apple is calling “Personalized Contact Posters” so instead of just your name and number showing up on the iPhone of someone you’re calling, they’ll see a customized image (or memoji) and **text of your choosing which could help persuade them into answering your call***. Apple also promises the Contact Posters will “also be available for third-party calling apps.”
Wait, so this is for strangers too? That seems rather ill-advised. I suppose it's a way to make people buy iPhones so they don't get ignored by other iPhone users because of the missing picture?
Now the scam callers will not only be able to spoof the FBI's phone number, but show a badge and a threatening full screen message too!
Somehow iMessage scams have been getting popular lately. Every once in a while I get a few phishing messages a day through iMessages. Then after a week it stops (they got caught, exploit closed, I don’t know).
More worrying that they could grab a photo off FB and spoof a family member. Lots of people would ignore the number if the face and name were familiar. How many people actually memorize phone numbers any more?
I suppose they can, but it wouldn't be a very convincing scam without a good voice replicator. Grabbing pictures is easy but isolating and replicating voices is still quite difficult, especially with the heavy accent many scammers seem to have.
The time of video call scams will come, but I don't think we're there just yet outside very targeted attacks on people in power or with huge amounts of wealth at their disposal.
The keynote says you will set your own design which other people will see you when you call them. So it’s not based on the contact photo you have saved in your phone for someone, it’s based on the information they set to be shared with you. It was not explicitly mentioned whether or not this will apply to everyone or only people you have already had contact with. I can imagine it being like airdrop where it only shows you all of that if you’re in each other’s contact list rather than just for every single inbound phone call from some random person. The video demonstration also showed there were some settings that could be tweaked, so possibly you might be able to set an override for someone in your own contact list and display what you want rather than what they provide. But none of that was clarified in the video. So unless this gizmodo article has access to more details, they’re probably just describing their interpretation of it, and I will take those details with a grain of salt, until we have a developer beta for more detailed documentation to clarify.
While I don't purport to know how it works, there's no indication this is any more automatic than the ALREADY EXISTING shared contact photos in Messages.
Yeah I was thinking this, too. Apple doesn’t do social networking in the modern sense, but they do have a connected and committed network. They could build some kind of publishing/feed app that leverages your contacts, group threads etc.
Actually, “group threads have a feed view / content publishing tools” is simple enough to work. Hm.
I would love to see this. There seems to be a really interesting opportunity for Apple to provide a privacy-respecting replacement for social media as we know it today. Somewhere between group texts/shared albums and private Instagram, with everything being end-to-end encrypted and meant to be shared in small groups.
Step 1: set your profile picture or whatever they call it as an ad. Use the free form text entry to customize the add for your target audience.
Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.
The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure if iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.
I imagine this will be tied to an Apple ID and you’ll lose your account pretty quickly if you abuse it. Or the customisation will be limited in some way. There’s no way Apple will let someone call thousands of random numbers showing porn for example. I imagine someone has thought about this.
It'll depend on how well Apple handles abuse reports. If they become too aggressive, killing someone's Apple account (including their precious memories on iCloud) could be a real risk for mass fake reports. If they become too lenient, scammers will strike.
For just $15 per account [1] you can buy your way into someone else's iCloud, no manual phishing or credential stuffing needed. You'll need to ban quite a few per day to get rid of all of them, and even then innocent people may lose their accounts.
I feel like accepting the spam call is far more painful than receiving it. This feels like it'd be an improvement, assuming the volume of spam doesn't increase with it substantially, since it's now much more obvious what's crap and what's not
most spam callers use some VOIP hack to imitate other phone numbers, but this will surely require linking that phone number to an iCloud account. I don’t know how spammers would do it, but I’m guessing this will actually be used to hide their identities behind iPhone accounts.
it’d really be funny for spammers to suddenly start showing up as Karen from Des Moines instead.
Actually thinking this through, it could be used to Dox people too.
I don't know how spoof resistant the feature will be. Hopefully Apple has thought about this, they probably have at least considered it.
Whether or not this is doxing will depend on the way this feature works. If it works like WhatsApp (where anyone with your phone number can look up your profile picture and status and that's considered Works As Intended) then it won't be long until every phone number has been mapped. If it works push-only, with new image URLs being generated for each call, I'm not so sure if it can be abused.
I'm sure security researchers will have some very interesting blogs about this system in the months to come.
Step 1: set your profile picture or whatever they call it as an ad. Use the free form text entry to customize the add for your target audience.
Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.
The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure it iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.
Sorry, but I do not want to see someone's Self advertising everytime I get a phone call. You know this will be used to show you ads when companies call, right? You think this will not be monetized?