for example: I work in a repair shop and I know I can buy absolutely zero bottles of acetylene on the company card because visa will flag it every time. they report it to the atf and you get a lovely visit...
but propylene? just as dangerous and flammable but i can buy it by the ton. we literally swapped out all our equipment for hot work cutting because visa.
I'd expect that to be Visa covering their butt in advance to not even have to think about it ...
Which smartphones block call recording? Every brandname Android I have had enables this feature for voice calls. (Although the feature is missing for app calls, and I'm now at least 5 years behind the newest phones.)
This explains a lot because this is a more recent development. https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-is-banning-call-recording-...
As the article says it was blocked a couple years ago but there was still a loophole which is now being closed as well. Though it's by blocking apps using it from the play store which can still be avoided by sideloading so technically there still is a loophole :) But it's definitely seeing more and more restrictions.
Except at Google and Samsung apparently. And there's no way to contest this decision for users, query it or even get a straight answer out of either company on it.
iOS?
I'm not sure of the current state of Android but back in the early days this feature also wasn't there (there were tons of apps that claim to do it but they all exploited some device-specific quirk and wouldn't work universally) despite the hardware being capable of doing this from day 1.
The reason call recording is shunned is that tons of scummy companies would suddenly end up in trouble if call recording becomes widespread and accessible to anyone.
(And in any case, as you suggest most people pay more per bit transmitted on a mobile voice call than they pay per bit as data.)
Purely for fun, it would be interesting to hack up two smart phones to transmit data over a voice call. Presumably, you can keep everything binary, if you control the end-points.
Practically, you‘d be better off using a throttled (after exceeding the included data volume) native data connection.
More than likely it's a handful of well-placed (by design or by luck) moralists acting at the willing behest of legal
Though I suppose a case can be made for the Fifth as well. The fact is that the Federal Government loves wielding access to the Financial System as a gigantic exercise of soft power. Centralization nakes exercising that power feasible.
A bunch of powerful people feel some stuff should be punished, but they can’t make it illegal. So they’ll stay in good term with de facto gate keepers and nudge them in their direction.
In the article it’s some billionaire, but ruling parties are probably doing the same extensively: instead of making the controversial decisions themselves, go through all the paperwork and get all the backlash, they’ll have a private entity deal with 95% of the problem (the industry “self-regulating”) and call it a day.
A pettier exemple than money transactions: there’s no reason smartphones shouldn’t be able to record calls out of the box (using it within legal boundaries should be on the user) but phone makers will self-block that behavior with no specific interest on their side.