I Want the Truth!

In the past few months I've been receiving a lot of unsolicited calls on my iPhone, so based on some online reviews I decided to see if Truecaller (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/truecaller-number-search-spam/id448142450?mt=8) would help me identify "spam" phone calls ahead of time. Truecaller leverages feedback from its user base to determine if calls are "spam" and populates its database from this feedback.  If a call originates from a phone number in the Truecaller spam database, I see this warning on my phone:

Based on a limited number of calls over the past 2 weeks, I estimate that roughly half of my spam calls had been correctly identified as such (true positives). For the most part, the other half of my spam calls slipped through Truecaller (false negatives), after which I dutifully reported those numbers to Truecaller.

Today I received a call which Truecaller identified as spam, only to find out later when listening to the voice message that it was an automated call from Kaiser Permanente reminding me to get a flu shot. To me, it felt like an error (false positive) for the call from Kaiser to be identified as spam. While I can understand that some folks would prefer not to receive flu shot reminders, appointment reminders, or other automated communication from Kaiser and would report it as spam, it felt to me like a legitimate call. This initially made me wonder if people simply do not value calls from their healthcare providers. I then hypothesized that it would be more appropriate for people to opt out of phone messages from Kaiser, but when I went to the Kaiser patient portal, I could find any settings to opt out of phone calls (there were settings to opt out of automated email messages). So from that perspective, maybe it was fair to label it as spam after all.

Overall, despite intercepting only about 50% of my spam calls, that's a lot better than 0%, so Truecaller is an app that will stay on my phone for the foreseeable future.