Why do phones come with SMS delivery reports turned off by default?

Arma@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 62 points –

Delivery reports are a convenience feature that lets the sender know if the message they sent has been received (not read) by the recipient's device (for this, it has to be online and have sufficient storage space, though modern phones usually have so much storage the latter is no problem at all).

Every single phone I ever had, from early Nokias in the 00s to Androids and iPhones, had it disabled by default. While feature phones often delivered these reports with a pop-up and sometimes notification sound, which some people could deem annoying, this trend continues even with smartphones, which typically display it merely as an indicator in the chats list of your messaging application.

So, is there an actual reason why it's turned off by default everywhere? The feature has to be enabled on the sender's device to receive these and the recipient has no way of opting out of this, so it's not a privacy thing by any means.

UPD: Apparently, carriers in some countries charge customers for receiving delivery reports as if they were sent messages. I've never realized this - reports always were absolutely free where I live. Thank you for your responses!

27

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

No one seems to be discussing that when a spammer learns that your number is in active use, they add it to a list and sell it to other spammers, so you get a lot more spam (particularly robo-dialing).

This is a worse problem in countries with weak anti-spam enforcement for phones (cough - USA - cough).

I'm not aware whether spammers and scammers are using these message receipts to scan across random numbers ro build their robo-dial lists, but I would be surprised if they are not doing so.

If they are not already doing it, I guarantee they're working on getting it to work for them in an affordable and convenient-to-them way.

For that reason, I keep message receipts off on my devices.

Edit: If it's really only for your incoming messages, none of the above applies. I'm not going to go look that up for a rude Internet stranger. That said, I would be wary, I've only seen this as an "opt-in" setting where if you're getting receipts, you're also sending them.

Message receipts are issued by the network, turning them off only applies to messages sent by you.

1 more...