Apple’s walled garden nabs exclusive iOS 14 robocall blocking on Verizon

Needless to say, everyone who updates to iOS 14 later in the year when the retail version is pushed out by Apple, will be able to take advantage of the Silence Junk Callers option on Verizon, but only the beta participants can be anointed right now.

What does Silence Junk Callers do? Exactly as it says on the tin, “it recognizes calls identified by the Verizon network as potential spam or fraud with additional intelligence and automatically sends them to voicemail without ringing your phone.”

Unfortunately, you’d have to subscribe to the Plus option of Verizon’s Call Filter app for $2.99/mo for one line or $7.99/mo for 3+ lines, in order to take advantage but you do get Caller ID, Spam Look Up, and Personal Block List extra compared to the free version.

T-Mobile recently introduced a similar feature, called Scam Shield, for free to its subscribers, and it all comes because The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a notice that by June 30, 2021, all phone companies are to adopt a caller ID authentication technology called STIR/SHAKEN.

STIR stands for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited, while SHAKEN is an abbreviation for Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs. The technology necessitates a caller ID signature, issued by the call’s originating carrier, which is later validated by other carriers before the call is completed. Therefore, carriers verify if the caller ID data, transmitted with the call, matches the caller’s phone number and can better identify spoofed calls before they reach the subscribers.