I 'member when they used to be called PMs.
I guess they aren’t private anymore.
My username and the hundreds of others like it back on R*ddit indicates otherwise 😆
just because people used to trust the government doesn’t mean they where ever trustworthy.
You’re username proves nothing except you used to believe.
Your username is not proof that your messages on Reddit were encrypted and not visible by anyone but you and the other party…
Well, they were before we decided every scrap of data needs to be vacuumed up to the cloud for marketing reasons, in that no one in the 90s was wasting committing computing resources to scan them and the necessary storage/databasing to store them long term aside from an inbox. I can say with a good degree of likelihood that my IRC chats and maybe AIM/MSN convos are probably gone, and that’s good thing.
Being private and nobody wanting to actually read them are two different things. Owners and operators of irc serves, bbs, etc have historically always been able to read the data flowing through them. Especially in the early internet and arpanet days where encryption didn’t even exist nor would it have been feasible given the computing power required at the time. My only point is that “private messages” have never been private if they’re through any service on the internet that is not verifiably encrypted end to end.
This was a teacher that told me in the 90s. “Phone calls are an invasion. When you call someone you’re saying ‘stop everything you’re doing and talk to me’. This was specially true when Caller ID was not a thing.”
Leaving a message equals to a DM or text. The recipient can respond later, but a call, it must be at that moment. It’s synchronous.
And people who use text apps for synchronous communication are holding it wrong. I shouldn’t be expected to respond immediately to a slack message.
It infuriates me when I’m talking to someone, their phone rings, and they instantly take the call while I’m still talking. It’s like someone interrupting me and they instantly switch focus to the other person, like what they have to say is more important than me.
And it irritates my friends how I’ll quickly check who it is, then ignore the call while someone is talking to me. “Aren’t you gonna take that?” No, I’m listening to you right now.
I don’t have a problem with phone calls and prefer them for urgent matters, but people need to stop with the preamble and reiterations. Asking me if I have time takes as much time as just telling me what you have to say. I already know you don’t really care if I have a moment because you’ll just say what you want regardless of my answer.
One thing that severely degrades the usefulness of the phone network is all the spam calls. It’s all I get these days. I can’t just call someone and have them pick up because nobody answers calls from unknown numbers.
It’s especially frustrating when I’m waiting for a call, like for a delivery, and have to pick up every unknown number.
ETA: Also, the immediacy of phone calls make them mainly used for emergencies. If I get a call from someone I know the first thought is “oh god what’s wrong?”
So I don’t call people because I don’t want to freak them out.
How is spam calls such a problem? Have probably had 2 cold calls the last 10 years. In norway you register on a goverment do-not-cold-call list and basically I have not gotten sales calls since.
Sadly, I live in the USA and do not have a functioning government. We can’t get health care, let alone reliable span call blocking.
Unfortunately I’ve heard the list is not well-enforced, so the do-not-call list functions more as a list of confirmed working numbers with humans on the other end. That’s why I’ve never tried using it…
I get probably 5 spam calls a week so if that keeps growing, I might have to give it a try…
101 UNSCHEDULED VIDEO CALL
How is skywriting so low on the list?
