By Ken Y-N (
July 14, 2007 at 22:41)
· Filed under Mobile, Polls
If you’ve signed up for dodgy mailing lists or are getting too many calls from your ex on your mobile phone, fortunately almost all Japanese cell phone models have features enabling you to blacklist other phone numbers, email addresses and even complete domains. Personally, all bar one mailing list that I’ve joined has honoured my unsubscribe requests, but whenever I get a dodgy ワンギリ, wan-giri, call, that is a call that just rings once so when you call back they apply assorted high pressure sales or extortion tactics to you, it goes into the banned list on my phone. Recently, NEPRO JAPAN looked at how the average person used mobile phone blacklisting features.
Demographics
Between 10 am on the 7th of June and 3 am on the 8th of June 2007 NEPRO JAPAN made a survey available to the general mobile-phone using public through the menuing systems of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode, SoftBank’s Yahoo! Keitai, and au by KDDI’s EZweb. 3,916 people self-selected themselves; 58% were female, 3% in their teens, 36% in their twenties, 44% in their thirties, and 17% aged forty or older.
Note that if you get a call from a number you don’t recognise, as well as the standard technique of Googling for it, another useful Japanese resource is this database of wan-giri numbers.
Research results
Q1: Have you ever used a mobile phone’s blacklisting service? (Sample size=3,916)
| Yes |
86% |
| No |
13% |
| Didn’t know about such a feature |
1% |
Q2: What have you blacklisted; phone calls, email, both or neither? (Sample size=3,916)
| Only phone calls |
21% |
| Only mail |
11% |
| Both calls and mail |
55% |
| Neither |
13% |
Q3: What sort of things did you blacklist, or what might you blacklist? (Sample size=3,916, multiple answer)
| No caller ID calls |
77% |
| Someone I thought was a stalker |
31% |
| People not in my phonebook/whitelist |
26% |
| People I don’t like |
25% |
| Calls from public phones |
16% |
| Exes |
13% |
| Work or school |
2% |
| Parents |
1% |
| Other |
34% |
| Wouldn’t block anything |
5% |
Now I think about it, my phone is set to send no caller ID calls straight to answerphone, but does that count as blacklisting?
Q4: How many entries are curently in your blacklist? (Sample size=3,916)
| No entries |
29% |
| One or two entries |
26% |
| Three or four entries |
16% |
| Five or six entries |
9% |
| Seven to ten entries |
7% |
| Eleven to twenty entries |
6% |
| Twenty-one to thirty entries |
3% |
| Thirty-one or more entries |
4% |
Q5: Have you had problems due to blacklisting contacts? (Sample size=3,916)
| Yes |
9% |
| No |
66% |
| Don’t know |
13% |
| Never blacklisted anyone |
12% |
Read more on: mobile phone,
nepro japan
Permalink
Related articles:
Fixed line phones future not so bleakVideo calling from mobilesMobile voice calling relatively rare in JapanTwo-fifth of Japanese habitually use vibrators
Subscribe to feed