
Over the past 35 years, views on privacy and Caller ID have flipped - dredmorbius
https://tedium.co/2019/12/05/telephone-caller-id-history/
======
simmons
Ah, this brings back memories. I signed up for Caller ID when it was first
available to me in 1994. Not only did I have the regular caller ID box, but
thanks to a fancy modem that could interpret the caller ID encoding, I rigged
a daemon to send a zephyrgram instant message with the caller's name and
number to my Sun workstation at work.

I distinctly remember people being a bit unnerved when I'd call them back and
say "Hey, I saw you called...". My girlfriend at the time was particularly
disturbed that I'd know she called even when she didn't leave a message.
People were used to treating unanswered calls as if they never happened, and
felt a bit violated when you knew that they had been investing effort into
contacting you instead of making a casual "what's up?" call.

It's very strange to think about such attitudes in the context of modern
communication. :)

~~~
4ntonius8lock
Not that different than consumers using tracking pixels to see open
time/place.

I use streak CRM for gmail and have learned to not mention the details of what
I see so as to not freak people out. The funny thing is, I can see 0.00001% of
what the commercial trackers can see, but people don't bat an eye on that.
They allow images to appear on emails by default, they don't block javascript,
they keep all the tracking cookies no their machine, etc.

~~~
pweezy
I've been on the receiving end of this from one or two online invitation
services (Paperless Post, maybe?). Had a friend say "can you come to my party
or what? You're the only one that still hasn't opened the invitation email". I
never had to sign up for an account to imagine what the service was doing -
showing "opened" stats straight out of Sendgrid or the like.

I had a similar reaction - email open tracking is something you assume, by
default, that regular individuals can't do. And I found it very invasive, even
though I know the same tracking exists on all the non-personal email I
received.

Since then I've made it a point not to open those invitations until I know I'm
ready to respond - since "I never saw the email" is a less harmful conclusion
for my snooping friend to draw than "I opened the email and decided not to
respond."

~~~
4ntonius8lock
Just make it so that images don't appear by default. I only open images if I
want to. Opening an email... I can't possibly understand why anyone would
allow images to open by default. Based on the people I communicate with, less
than 5% block image opening.

Also, I don't get why I'm being downvoted.

------
abruzzi
I'm curious why, at some point in the transition from land-line caller ID to
cellular caller ID, did it cease to provide the name and only provide the
number? The only time I get a name associated with an incoming call is when
the number provided matches a number in my address book.

~~~
sneak
It's wrapped around, and now cellular caller ID sends the number+name again!

~~~
0xffff2
Sadly, T-Mobile at least only provides the name now (on the call screen, can
still get the number from the call history afterwards). It's quite annoying as
the number is usually more useful than whatever name is in their database for
anyone that's not already in my contacts.

------
fortran77
I remember seeing the hearings on local television in NY about Caller ID. It
needed state approval to be rolled out in NY in the early 80s.

There were two opposing but very emotional factions.

One was a women's advocacy group saying that caller ID was bad because if a
woman hiding from an abusive husband or boyfriend needed to make a call to
him, her location would be revealed by caller ID. (See
[https://books.google.com/books?id=3IATAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA47&dq#v=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=3IATAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA47&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false)
)

A second group, also advocating for women, claimed that Caller ID would allow
women to know who was making abusive obscene phone calls.

Of course, we have Caller ID now, and it's generally liked by all.

~~~
lostlogin
You can call the teleco and get caller ID turned off where I live, is this not
a thing everywhere?

~~~
reaperducer
Where I was, it could be turned off on a per-call basis only. Probably because
the telco charged each time you did it.

------
logfromblammo
Article claims that the 1995 No Doubt song, _Spiderwebs_ , references Caller
ID. Clearly, the song is about an implausible excuse recorded as an outgoing
answering machine message, not Caller ID. "I'm walking into spider webs. Leave
a message, and I'll call you back."

For the youngsters, an answering machine was the precursor technology to voice
mail. It was a hardware device that you installed on a landline--the only kind
of phone line most people had--between the demarcation point and your phone
handset, that automatically answered a phone call after a programmed number of
rings. The machine then played the outgoing message, sounded a beep, and
recorded the subsequent audio as an incoming message. The machine could be set
to play the incoming audio through a speaker, and if the call was from a
familiar source, the phone handset could then be picked up. This was referred
to as "screening your calls".

Equally clearly, the superior cultural documentation for Caller ID is the
_Scream_ movies. _Scream_ came out in 1996, and _Scream 2_ in 1997. Sydney did
not have Caller ID in the first, and had purchased it by the second, to combat
crank callers. After the release of _Scream_ , Caller ID use _tripled_ in the
US. (That may be coincidental, attributable to the adoption rate of a new and
useful technology.)

~~~
SilasX
>Article claims that the 1995 No Doubt song, Spiderwebs, references Caller ID.
Clearly, the song is about an implausible excuse recorded as an outgoing
answering machine message, not Caller ID.

You're referring to this part of the article?

>> No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs,” featured a protagonist, Gwen Stefani, who was
screening her phone calls—something made easier with Caller ID.

The article is correct, some of the lyrics explicitly refer to screening
calls[1]:

"And it's all your fault/ I screen my phone calls/ No matter who calls/ I
gotta screen my phone calls"

In common parlance, that means checking who's calling you before deciding if
you'll take the call, which involves Caller ID. [2]

I don't know where you're getting the song being about implausible excuse from
the caller -- the song is about Gwen not wanting to talk to someone who thinks
she's interested (and Genius confirms):

"You think that we connect ... Your words walk right through my ears/
Presuming I like what I hear".

And later in verse 2:

"Don't have the courage inside me/ To tell you please let me be"

If you're referring to the "a likely story", look at the surrounding lines:

"Sorry I'm not home right now ... So leave a message and I'll call you back/ A
likely story, but leave a message/ And I'll call you back."

That is, she's recognizing that her claim of not being available is
implausible.

Finally, my love of that song paid off on HN!

[1] [https://genius.com/No-doubt-spiderwebs-lyrics](https://genius.com/No-
doubt-spiderwebs-lyrics)

[2] EDIT: A now-deleted reply pointed out that _at the time_ it wouldn't be
understood as referring to caller ID, as it wasn't very common to have, and
most people screened by listening to the message. I stand corrected.

Still, the article only says that screening is made easier with caller ID,
which is correct, and the song is still about screening calls because of
unwanted attention, not, as was claimed, about the implausible content of said
message.

~~~
dionidium
> _In common parlance, that means checking who 's calling you before deciding
> if you'll take the call, which involves Caller ID. [2]_

Not true! " _Screening your phone calls_ " in those days meant waiting for
someone to start leaving a message on your answering machine, which you could
hear in the room in real time [0], and then only picking up the phone if it
was someone you wanted to talk to.

[0] Messages weren't left on a server that you'd access later. They were
recorded on a physical tape in your house. You could hear the person leaving
the message as they did it.

~~~
SilasX
Hence the correction in the footnote.

~~~
dionidium
You're right. Sorry!

------
jdofaz
I remember when caller id was introduced, there was a rush to call the phone
company to have your outgoing caller id blocked by default because after the
initial rollout there was a fee to enable the block.

Then after some time they added an option for caller id subscribers that would
block blocked numbers.

My dad had his outgoing caller id blocked for a long time and I remember
having to dial *82 for almost everyone I called.

~~~
pweezy
Ah, I remember those days - I had the same situation at home.

As the article mentions, you could dial the _67 prefix to block your outgoing
caller ID on an individual call.

With the blocking-of-blocking, you had the opposite - the _82 prefix
_disabled_ outgoing caller ID block on an individual call, allowing you to
call subscribers that blocked blocked numbers.

I think my folks finally decided to drop the caller ID blocking after the
phone company switched from 7-digit to mandatory 10-digit dialing for all
calls. It was just too many digits to dial with the prefix, especially since
half the time you would dial without the prefix, get the "blocked" message,
then dial again with the prefix.

------
musicale
Whenever I visit someone with a landline that actually rings, I remember what
an obnoxious interruption that used to be.

------
Fjolsvith
Frankly, I view 'Caller ID' as a fraudulent service, and I've complained to
Verizon (my provider) that they were the ones perpetrating the fraud because
they present the 'Caller ID' to me while knowing the source phone number for
every call.

I'd like to see a service called 'Originating Number'.

~~~
ouid
I don't think this is how it works at the moment, but I see no reason why it
could not work this way. Public key cryptography is certainly capable of
verifying the origin of a caller against some certificate authority.

------
scarejunba
It's funny. Even today I say "Hello, it's myname here" when I leave a voice
mail because that's how answering machines worked. Now, obviously, with caller
ID I don't need to say that.

~~~
hinkley
There are still plenty of small companies that ask you to leave your number in
voicemail. I guess corporate voicemail doesn't work as well as smartphones?

Half the time when I call a company I have an ongoing relationship with, they
have all of my information available. Half the time they don't.

ISPs and the phone company in particular stand out, as the question of "if we
get disconnected can I call you back at this number?" vs, "what number should
I call you back at?" to which I reply, "this number", followed by a pregnant
pause, no reaction from them, so I say my phone number.

And for some reason I can't decide which one is more annoying.

------
shkkmo
I don't see why we have to make the names of phone number owners publicly
available or even available to callees.

We need to to remove the ability to spoof the calling number and we need to to
require phone companies to penalize and terminate numbers that get reported
for making spam calls.

Edit: My mistake, caller ID actually refers to the system that sends the phone
number (and optionally the name) of the callar. The legislation that was
passed doesn't se to prohibit the caller from blocking caller ID or even from
spoofing the number, it requires phone companies to verify that number and
notify the caller of it can't be verified. It also increases penalties and
enforcement options/mandates against illegal robocallers and scammers

~~~
dredmorbius
As someone who's relatively well-described by this article as having ...
largely shifted my viewpoints, I both agree that the privacy concerns for
_callers_ are real, but also have a hard time sorting out how any identity
system that _doesn 't_ accurately reflect the calling number to the recipient,
would work.

Alternatives might be for telcos to track caller reputation, or for there to
be an additional trust/verification step for certain cases. For individual
call recipients, that's the general problem currently. In the case of
businesses, there are generally two problems introduced by Caller ID (or its
lack):

1\. Filtering out robocalls and spam / scam calls.

2\. Preserving the privacy of _other_ callers. For toll-free numbers, the
caller's identity (or at least number) has long been available, ostensibly for
billing purposes, but as a bit of tracking and marketing data was also a key
selling point of such systems. Yes, you're paying for the call, but you're
gaining valuable (to you, if not the caller) marketing data.

When Caller ID systems first went into place, _that_ tracking information was
a concern. Note that Caller ID blocking (an actual service) did _not_ apply to
800 / toll-free numbers:

[https://www.verizonwireless.com/businessportals/support/faqs...](https://www.verizonwireless.com/businessportals/support/faqs/FeaturesandOptionalServices/faq_caller_id_block.html#item2)

Discussion of privacy issues here:

[https://www.mightycall.com/blog/protecting-privacy-caller-
id...](https://www.mightycall.com/blog/protecting-privacy-caller-id/)

~~~
wl
> Note that Caller ID blocking (an actual service) did not apply to 800 /
> toll-free numbers:

Not quite. Caller ID blocking works on toll-free numbers. The issue is that
toll-free numbers have access to another system, ANI, which provides the
originating phone number. It's also possible to get ANI on non-toll-free lines
if you're willing to pay.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identificatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identification)

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks.

