Don't ever answer private numbers. This way you'll be respecting their privacy.
Can you explain how a car accident lead to this?
Some places accidents are public record so it could be predatory lawyers
My wife had a forgotten bill get sent to small claims instead of actually contacting her. As soon as it hit the small claims court system she got inundated with ads from law firms offering to represent her
I would agree w this. Had a parent get into a minor fender bender & had to help field calls from multiple injury lawyers.
Freedom or something.
I’ve never understood why things like this have to be a part of public record. Traffic accidents, traffic citations, bankruptcies, buying a house, and even getting divorced.
All of those are very personal things that should never be a part of public record. And even if they are, the PII should not.
Simple improvement: Add a fee to access the personally identifiable information. And make the record of accessing the information public.
Not perfect, but better.
Each one of these events is easily shown to have good merits for being public record. Even ignoring the obvious case of "we want to track what the police/courts were actually doing".
Traffic accidents
Occurs in front of your property and cause some amount of damage to your stuff that officers didn't outline in any reports. You want to be able to figure out who did it so you can send them the bill/sue them. Hiding these records doesn't make sense. Other obvious uses would be to find out where someone went/is missing, eg if someone died.
traffic citations
You're attempting to hire someone for a job, part of that job is some amount of driving. Being able to lookup if they have any record of driving poorly would be due diligence you'd expect a company to do. Hell getting into an Uber or Lyft... You might want to lookup your driver. You could be surprised.
bankruptcies
Hire someone to do something related to finances in your company? Or to file your taxes? Might want to actually double check they're not idiots on their own dime either. Someone asks you for a loan, or any other financial related stuff. Records of them defaulting are important.
buying a house
Your dog ran up to me and bit me, then ran away. Being able to get the property details can be highly important.
getting divorced
Can trigger a number of things. If divorce has any kid related issues... and one parent no longer has rights to the child... Schools/doctors can validate that one parent no longer has those rights without just blindly trusting random documents one parent provides.
Say that under any thread about any billionaire and watch your comment get double digit downvotes
I don’t like the existence of billionaires anymore than the next reasonably-sane pleb does. But someone’s financial/social status should never be a consideration to their constitutional right of privacy. You’ll just have to find some other way to harangue them for their behavior.
Bankruptcy should 100% be a public record.
Why? To publicly humiliate a person? Not everyone is evil; people fall on hard times. It happens. A lot. Why should they be further harassed by predatory practices of being offered loans after they’ve hit the rock bottom of their financial world? Because the first thing that happened when I filed for bankruptcy was to be offered a mortgage loan.
These calls might be from lawyers. Check your mail and see if you are getting mail from lawyers. They are all trying to beat each other to get you to sign with them.
Sounds like spam to me.
How would random laywers have access to your number?
Better call Saul, am I rite?
I don't know how all states operate but they have access to police reports that have your contact info. If it doesn't have your number then background reports.
It's all call center spam. People speaking Chinese or Hindi in the background
Which means they're not going to respect your local do not call lists.
Highly recommend getting on the national do not call list https://www.donotcall.gov/ . Doesn't stop all spam calls, but it shrunk the amount I got at least
This is why having a virtual number is good - my google voice number catches the overwhelming majority of the spam
That’s what I use it for. I really want to find an alternative provider (Voice and YouTube are the last Google products I use), but haven’t settled on anything yet.
Tell me if you find something ever. 🫶🙈🤜🤛
What’s a good non google alternative though?
I use mysudo. It's not free, but pretty cheap at $10 a year.
Normal phone number + carrion is decent
Mildly?
You can also block calls from unrecognized numbers. Doesn't stop them from being able to leave a voicemail though which is both good and bad
From that screen-> three dots -> settings -> blocked numbers -> block calls from unknown numbers.
