Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: jgro@apldbio.com (Jeremy Grodberg) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: CPID/ANI Developments Message-ID: <4470@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 27 Feb 90 04:19:38 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: jgro@apldbio.com (Jeremy Grodberg) Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 97 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 131, Message 5 of 8 In his article on CPID/ANI Developments, Mr. Toth mentions several possibilities for maintaining the calling party's privacy under a calling-party-id system, and explains why none of them are attractive. What he did not discuss is the idea which I have heard (perhaps even read in this forum?) which makes the most sense to me. I would like to hear what problems there are with the following scheme: The phone company assigns a fictitious id# to those subscribers who request one. This would typically be people who have unlisted phone numbers. These fictitious id#s would be known to the subscriber, so that s/he could give them out to whoever s/he wanted. When calls are placed from the subscribers phone, the fictitious id# is displayed instead of the real phone number. Since this number is tied to a phone number, it serves the same identification purpose: A receipient who is familiar with the number knows what phone a call is coming from, if they are familiar with the number displayed. However, to ensure the privacy of the caller, the fictitious id# would not be able to be used to call back the caller, nor would the phone companies be allowed to reveal who a given id# belongs to, except under court order. Some method would be used to enable people to recognize the difference between real phone numbers and fictitious id#s, the simplest of which is that real phone numbers could show up as 1+Real Area Code + Real Phone Number, and fictitious id#s would be 2+Real Area Code + Fake Phone Number. (I am not familiar with how the numbers are actually stored and displayed, so there is probably a better way, but nothing I have read so far makes me think that it would be difficult to implement the fictitious id# so that it would be easy to tell it from a real phone number). This scheme has the following advantages: 1) People who receive calls always know what phone a call is coming from, even if they don't know that phone's number. Thus people receiving crank calls can tell the authorities where the calls are coming from, and people getting calls from their psychiatrist know who the call is from, without being able to call the psychatrist at home (the psychiatrist could print his or her id# on his or her business card). This protects the person receiving the calls, as the service is designed to. It also allows businesses to access individual callers accounts by id#, if they want to establish such service. 2) It seems, to my outsider's eye, that this is completely feasible. While it would require some extra record-keeping by the phone company to keep track of people's fictitious id#s, it is a small extra piece if information to add to all the other stuff they already keep track of (like name, address, calling card #'s, etc.). Also, the fictitious id#s could be handled like real phone numbers by all of the equipment involved with providing and displaying the calling-party ID. The only problem I can forsee is that of supplying the fictitious id# at the originating switch: since I don't know how the real phone number is supplied, I can't say how much harder it would be to supply a fictitious one. I am guessing it is a relatively simple matter to replace one string with another, but I'm sure I could be wrong. 3) There is very little breach of the caller's privacy, although there is some. What little breach there is may well be justifiable, like taking pictures of anyone who walks into a bank (no flames for a bad analogy, please). A user of a phone with a fictitious id# can call anyone he or she wants, and all the recipient of the call will know is if it is someone who called before, unless the caller previously gave the call recipient further information, or unless the call recipient can convince the police that the caller has done something illegal. For those who are truely paranoid about having someone find them, such as people who might call a suicide prevention hot-line, they are already worried that the phone company can trace their call, and I don't think fictitious id#s will make matters much worse. The most innocent problem I can think of under this scheme is that a person might do business with a company which maintains customer records based on the recieved id#, and so even someone with a fictitious id# would not be able to make an anonymous call to such a business, from the phone they normally use. This is at most an inconvenience, not a breach of privacy. Another version of this scheme would assign fictitious id#s to ALL phones. Unlisted phones would always send the fictitious id#, but listed phones could substitiute the fictitious one by keying a privacy code when dialing. This even solves the problem (for listed phones) of making anonymous calls to a buisness with which the caller has established a relationship. I submit this for discussion, because I am a big fan of CPID, and would very much like to have it work. It won't be useful to me, though, if anyone who wants to keep me from seeing who is calling can, and the only way people can avoid giving out their phone numbers is to remove all useful information about who is calling. I may not really like the idea that with CPID I might not be able to get away with calling my friends and playing jokes on them, but I do like even more that they won't be able to play jokes on me. If there are no problems with this system, perhaps someone can suggest it to the powers that be, and we can really have it. If there are problems, perhaps we can work them out though this forum.