Phone Gadget Reveals Caller’s Number

When Michael J. Fox goes Back to the Future (Part II), he finds a phone in the year 2015 whose view screen not only shows the caller, but offers personal details--age, address, occupation, political affiliation.

It’s hardly far-fetched. One new gee-whiz product from our phone companies is Automatic Number Identification, or Caller ID: The caller’s number is displayed in a little window even before the person called answers the phone. People can thus screen calls, avoid unwanted callers, contact callers who wouldn’t leave their numbers.

ANI is just one of many new features “that make the telephone a little computer,” says Peter Ventimiglia, spokesman for New Jersey Bell in Newark, N.J. But it’s the one getting attention, because it has a downside: What’s information to someone receiving the call may be unwanted disclosure for callers who want to surprise someone, provide an anonymous tip, or just keep their number private.

It thus raises questions of privacy which threaten the whole product, although one of its benefits, ironically, is privacy of another kind--something known as “phone security.” Because people can identify the number from which threatening calls are made and refuse repeat calls from such numbers, the industry believes that this is “the best technology,” says Ventimiglia. “for thwarting obscene or harassing phone calls.”

Small businesses get a different security. Pizza stores, we’re told, can call numbers back to verify orders, or check phone directories to see that no jokester is sending them to a vacant lot. Undertakers, doctors, and others on call can check they’re really needed when summoned at midnight to a given location.

National merchandisers and promoters can invite calls (perhaps on 800 or 900 numbers) from people interested in certain sports events, rock music, or even free product samples, and then “capture” their numbers for other promotions. This being the computer age, they can also match the numbers with reverse telephone directories and other databases, public and private, to produce targeted lists for other merchandising.

The problem is that this service, uniquely, “compels the disclosure of personal information without the consent of the caller,” says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington office of a membership group called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. People wanting anonymity won’t call drug or child abuse hot lines, or phone law enforcers with tips. Consumers may not want to reveal their numbers when making inquiries of merchants or registering complaints. People with unlisted numbers, and those in professions open to personal threat can’t call from home.

The commercial uses of “captured” phone numbers are even more worrisome, because such information, innocently provided to one business, may end up with another. Indeed, the privacy issue is almost defined by the question of “whether the consumer knows how the information is going to be used,” says Rotenberg.

Oddly enough, or symptomatically, caller number identification has only become a topic of public discussion as it’s being offered to residential users. It was developed some years ago, has been available on some 800 services for almost two years, and barring FCC rejection of AT&T;’s recent request to offer it on 900 service, will be available there as well (meantime, 900 entrepreneurs can get caller numbers from their carriers, on tape or paper).

Even now, consumers may not understand it. When New Jersey Bell, the first operating company to get approval to offer Caller ID statewide, did so this year, only 2% of those offered the service took it (at $6.50 a month residential, $8.50 business, plus $60-80 for a display unit). They obviously didn’t get the implications: 63% of the residential customers who subscribed have unpublished numbers, i.e. a wish to keep their own numbers private.

Indeed, consumers only hear about Caller ID if their local phone company is offering it or seeking regulatory approval, and if the request is publicized and challenged. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, for example, utility commissions approved the service over the objections of state public or consumer advocate offices: New Jersey’s advocate asserted the caller’s right to privacy, Pennsylvania’s invoked the state’s wiretap law, forbidding the use of devices which capture a caller’s phone number. California passed a law requiring that any company offering such service must also offer a blocking option, so that callers can keep their number from being displayed.

There is little debate about this service on a national level, as offered by interstate carriers. This is not the realm of people calling people locally, of obscene callers and pizza parlors. It’s people calling businesses, often long distance, and unwittingly offering their numbers to list makers--a practice already widespread and seemingly unstoppable.

In either case, the commonly suggested solution is some sort of blocking for customers who don’t want their numbers revealed. Thus phone companies would be working both ends, providing one party an access to caller numbers and the other an ability to withhold them.

Nobody suggests getting rid of ANI and Caller ID entirely, although its value on any terms is debatable, and the little extra privacy it offers subscribers results, says California Assemblyman Gerald Eaves (D-Rialto), in “a general decrease in privacy for all telephone subscribers.” Even for privacy seekers, it’s unnecessary and not really workable. One can get equally good “phone security” from answering machines and available call-tracing, and anyone with Caller ID will soon realize that rejecting all unrecognizable numbers is not privacy but death of communication.

There’s even a workable alternative for commercial users: They could ask callers for their numbers. That way, they’d only get numbers that are willingly given, and therefore more useful anyway.

Actually, the most common argument for number identification services is that they’re there, and represent some advance. As California’s Public Utilities Commission declared (after defining the right to privacy as a “right to be ‘left alone,’ not a right to remain anonymous”), the concern “is that prematurely legislating a new right to anonymity will impede further technological development of the telecommunication network.”

Or, in the words of Dan Clearfield, Pennsylvania’s senior assistant consumer advocate, “This is the information age, and heaven forbid we should stop the march of progress.”