From: zerkle@toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems
Subject: Re: Caller ID
Date: 10 Oct 92 05:53:53 GMT
Reply-To: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis

In article <153.31651@incc.com> jerry@incc.com (Jerry Rocteur) writes:
> Unless you are up to no good, when would you ever want to call
> someone and not want them to know who you are ???

Calling a suicide/battered woman/drug abuse/etc. help line.

Call-in radio shows.

Anonymous police tip lines.

Your old friend, who can't know where you live because you are in a
witness protection program.

A child's mother, to let her know that her teenager was seen buying
drugs on the corner (better this way than the police).

Your ex-husband, so you can talk to your daughter who lives there, but you
don't want him to know where you live.

Any business that will record your phone number and use it for cold
calls later to try to sell you a Ronkomatic Turnip Twaddler.  Then
sell it to every other company that comes along.

The reason telephone companies want caller id so bad has nothing to do
with the welfare of their customers.  They just want money.  They have
big plans for all sorts of service packages they can sell.  All of
them hinge on caller id.

Your phone number is quite valuable.  With caller id, once you call a
business for any reason, they'll have it.  They can call you back to
try and sell you things.  They can look it up in a database and cross
reference it with your address.  They can sell it to direct-mail
companies with any information you may have revealed in your call.
This is the reason there is such a big lobbying push in many states to
legalize caller id, along with slick television ads.  Again, it has
nothing to do with consumers well-being, and everything to do with
money.

Remember the CD-ROMs that Lotus (I think) was making with data on
every household they could?  You couldn't see or correct your own
record, but any old business would have no problems getting lots of
data about you.  With your telephone number, any company has a unique
identifier of your household.  Databases already exist that will give
your name, address, and so forth from your phone number.  Of course,
with your phone number so widely available, much more information
could be put in these sorts of databases.

My credit card company makes more money selling my address to various
direct-mail companies than they do charging interest to me (which is
nothing).  The next time I call up some mail-order company to find the
latest price on modems, I don't want to be indexed, cross referenced,
sold, filed, mailed, told I "may already be a winner," called, pestered,
categorized, and proselytized.

Caller id will not really help you as a normal telephone customer.  If
someone calls you up and starts bothering you, you can just hang up.
If you really need to screen calls, an answering machine is much more
effective.  If someone really wants to bother you, he or she can just
use a pay phone, right?  Caller ID won't help you there.

California has it right.  The legislature has legalized caller ID, but
has required telephone companies to provide free per-call and per-line
blocking.  Since most people would probably get this once they found
out the real results of caller ID, no company in California has bothered
offering the service.

The mechanisms to protect the telephone customer are already in place.
The campaign to legalize caller ID really isn't conducted to help
consumers.  It's conducted to help businesses make more money, and at
the expense of the telephone caller's privacy.

--
Dan Zerkle  zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu  (916) 756-5170