Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: BBN.COM!clements@cs.utexas.edu (Bob Clements) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Caller ID -- A Bad Idea Message-ID: Date: 25 Aug 89 15:40:42 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: Bob Clements Lines: 33 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 326, message 2 of 9 In article covert@covert.enet.dec. com (John R. Covert) writes: >I'm going to be as brief as possible, since this has been argued before. OK, me too. >These are the two most often stated benefits: [Skipping the first one, not a benefit to us consumers.] > 2. Stopping harrassing phone calls. >The second does not require caller ID to the end-user. As currently >implemented a subscriber who doesn't have a display can still trap harrassing >callers by dialling a special code after the call, causing the number to be >given to the phone company or police harrassment center. Here I disagree. Trapping the number to the CO may not help you at all. The problem is that the definition of "harassment" that the telco and the police use may not match yours. You may want to take legitimate consumer/economic action against an obnoxious "telemarketer", for example. Or in a case that happened to me, the harassment went on for a short enough period of time that I'm confident no police department would have acted. But I wanted to know the source and couldn't get it. My short-form conclusion on Caller-ID: 1) The caller should have the right to suppress the ID. 2) The callee should have the right to have unidentified calls suppressed, without even ringing the called phone. (Maybe the caller hears "Unidentified calls are not being accepted at that number" and gets billed for the call, of course.) I think that is fair to the caller, the callee and the telco. /Rcc