Spam Call Filtering

You’ve long been able to block incoming calls on your iPhone, but this is only helpful if you’re regularly getting annoying calls from the same numbers. Apple’s debut of CallKit in iOS 10 allowed a whole slew of third-party apps to offer more sophisticated call filtering, but most of these came with a pretty serious privacy tradeoff — you basically had to share your call history, and possibly even your whole contact list, with these third-party apps.

With iOS 13, it looks like Apple will be taking on the task of filtering spam calls itself, and likely doing it in its usual privacy-focused way. There will be a broad setting to “silence unknown callers,” which will presumably include anybody not in your contacts, although we’re hoping that Apple will also use its machine learning expertise to also look to other data on your iPhone, such as mail and messages, as it already does when attempting to identify other incoming calls.