Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!netsys!vector!telecom-gateway From: nomdenet@venera.isi.edu Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Just Say No To Caller I.D. Message-ID: Date: 25 Mar 89 01:19:59 GMT Sender: news@vector.UUCP Lines: 84 Approved: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 109, message 2 of 3 In vol. 9 no. 102 John Higdon In article , gast@cs.ucla.edu (David Gast) > writes: > > > 5) The phone company will argue that consumers can always pay extra and > > not allow Caller ID or punch extra digits to disable it on a call by > > call basis. Why should a consumer have to pay extra or push extra > > buttons to not get a service he does not want? > > Because, for one thing, he would be trying to stop a person from > getting a service that *was* being paid for, namely Caller ID. In this > society it costs a little extra and takes a little more effort to > preserve one's privacy. We may not like it, but the universe doesn't > care. 1) An advertiser pays for a 30-second spot during "LA Law", which I tape on my VCR; by the argument above advertisers should be allowed to curtail provision of VCRs' fast-forward keys because my use of the FF key to skip over commercials deprives advertisers of services they paid for. Poppycock. 2) Europeans in general, and Scandinavians in particular, go to greater lengths to protect the individual's privacy. "It costs governments and corporations a little extra and takes them a little more effort to preserve privacy. We may not like it, but the universe doesn't care." 3) In the 1988 SF novel "David's Sling"[1] the author, Marc Stiegler, presents a taxonomy of decisions and decision making: "... three broad classes of decisions, and three broad methods of decision making: Engineering decisions, political decisions, and unresolvable decisions. Engineering decisions were made by finding the correct, or best, answer. ... Political decisions were made by building an answer of consensus. ... Because political decision systems could generate decisions in more situations than engineering decision systems, political systems typically gained preeminence over engineering. For the most part, this arrangement worked well -- except that too often, the politicians made political decisions in situations where engineering applied ... The key question was, how do you decide whether to use engineering or politics to decide?" In this framework it seems to me that all questions concerning calling- party ID and privacy are political. I don't believe any engineer can say there is any "best" answer. Assuming SS#7 or equivalent from end to end, the caller's number is always available; bits are reserved in a packet for that number, or bits go down a subscriber line to the display unit between the first and second rings; and a program in some # ESS decides what to stuff in those bits. Clearly there's a cost to implementing a packet-based protocol and its communication infrastructure, as well as to providing new subscriber-line interface cards; just as clearly at this hardware and protocol level there's no cost associated with the bits' values. At the ESS-program level I would expect the (software) engineering judgement to be that there's virtually no cost differential between always passing on the caller's number and checking whether the caller wants his/her number kept private, either as the norm or for this call only. I believe the program logic of this section of ESS code should be determined by our society as a whole: What do we want, what consensus can we reach? Mr. Higdon's opinion and mine differ. His position can be inferred from the excerpt above. I vote to protect and maximize both the caller's and callee's privacy, and to have the telephone system do so as a default when possible. I'll pay for Calling-Line ID and accept any reconnection to another exchange, but I also want the supplementary service of Calling-Line ID Restriction mentioned by Fred Goldstein in Vol. 9 no. 93. AT NO CHARGE and without requiring any prefatory dialling if I so choose. I also want the ability to choose to reject calls whose originating number has been withheld. A. R. White USC/Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina Del Rey, California 90292-6695 (213) 822-1511, x162 (213) 823-6714 facsimile ARPA: nomdenet @ ISI.edu [1] David's Sling, by Marc Stiegler; 1988; Baen Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster; New York. ISBN 0-671-65369-5