Another thing is that I feel like the era of the private phone number has passed. I see the use case for phone numbers for businesses, but people just don’t use them very much anymore otherwise.
Like, we don’t memorize them. We don’t dial them. They’re just entries in our contacts.
At this point, we could create an alternative way of contacting private phones. Something based on whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Something that can be easily shared but not easily guessed. Something that would be easy to trace who called you.
All of these phone scams rely on the idea that a stranger can just up and contact you without any effort. It’s ridiculous. If we got rid of that, we’d save people from untold billions of dollars of scams almost instantly.
The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.
Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.