Call ID Service Makes Science Fiction a Reality
In the movie “Back to the Future Part II,” the character played by Michael J. Fox gets a phone call in the year 2015. As a face appears on Fox’s big-screen picture phone, type at the bottom of the screen flashes not only the caller’s name and address, but his age and job title, his wife’s and kids’ names, his politics and hobbies, even his food preferences.
It was just a fleeting moment in that comedy’s hyperkinetic look at future pop culture. But using phone connections to identify callers and even to delve into their backgrounds is no longer lightweight science fiction.
In several states, phone companies are already offering Caller ID. The service allows home phone customers to see the phone number of the person calling them before they pick up the receiver. The number appears on a small box with a display screen.
The leading manufacturer of the Call Identifier box (a unit attached to home phone jacks that sells on average for less than $100) is Colonial Data Technologies Corp. in New Milford, Conn.
Like a high-tech rock plunked into the placid pool of our phone culture--a culture of push-button anonymity that has yielded both obscene phone calls and lifesaving hot lines--the splash made by Caller ID could be felt by everyone from undercover cops to mothers-in-law, from bill collectors to battered women.
Proponents of Caller ID see it as an electronic peephole that lets you decide which calls you wish to take. Opponents--who would require that the service be provided with free blocking for anyone who doesn’t want their phone number exposed--see it as an X-ray-by-phone that would reveal unlisted phone numbers, identities and other information callers don’t want to give out.
In Connecticut, Southern New England Telecommunications appears in no rush to offer Caller ID.
“We’re aware of the concerns that many people have regarding privacy,” SNET spokesman William Seekamp says. “We frankly want to see how that gets worked out in some of the areas where it (Caller ID) has been introduced.”
(In Pennsylvania, where Caller ID service was to have begun this week, opponents won a temporary injunction from a state court. The service will be allowed to go into effect only for police, fire and emergency service users.)
But SNET has received approval to offer, on a yearlong trial basis, a package of services called Star Call.
Among those services, which will be tried out in several Connecticut communities, is one that allows subscribers to block calls coming from specified phone numbers.
Another service allows subscribers to automatically trace a call they have just received by punching a few buttons on their touch-tone phones. (The traced number would not be accessible to the consumer, but would be held by the phone company for use by the police in a legal action.)
“You don’t get the ID, but you can exercise some control over incoming calls,” Seekamp says of Star Call.
In fact, at some business switchboards around the country, Connecticut callers are already having their phone numbers identified, Seekamp says.
So-called Automatic Number Identification--in effect, Caller ID on a mass scale--is now offered by long-distance phone companies and used by dozens of businesses nationwide.
Advanced ANI systems not only display the phone number you’re calling from (including unlisted ones, Seekamp says), but also cross-index that number with other computer databases to reveal your name and address as well as--shades of “Back to the Future”--demographic details based on where you live, from what kind of house you live in to what kind of car you drive.
As for Caller ID, phone companies such as New Jersey Bell, which began offering the service more than a year ago, give it a ringing endorsement.
“It’s the best technology available for putting an end to things like harassing, obscene or irritating phone calls, which is a major problem,” Jersey Bell spokesman Peter Ventimiglia says.
Garden State phone owners received about 360,000 such calls in the year before Caller ID became available, he says.
Ventimiglia also cites the service’s tracking advantages to small businesses such as pizza parlors, which are plagued by prank calls or worse--robberies of their delivery workers.
New Jersey Bell does not offer blocking for those who don’t want their numbers revealed, even though Ventimiglia concedes, “The technology is there” to do it. “In our view, it diminishes the value of the service,” he says.
So far, nearly 30,000 New Jersey Bell customers have signed up for the service, which costs $6.50 a month after a $21 installation fee. (At the moment, the service only identifies numbers of callers within the same area code.)
The phone company reports a dozen complaints about the service.
“Our experience with the service here in New Jersey simply doesn’t prove out any of those speculative objections” to it, he says.
But civil libertarians and consumer advocates are not so sanguine.
“The potential impact on individual privacy is enormous,” says William Olds, executive director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union.
Olds cites as examples the dampening effect on government and corporate whistle-blowers, whose calls and identities could be instantly traced, and the service’s undermining effect on the 219,000 SNET customers (about 15%) with non-published phone numbers.
He adds that making a simple inquiry by phone to a business, from a real estate firm to a car dealership, could get your number on a list for phone solicitation.
