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.
