Caller ID Plan Stirs Controversy : Telecommunications: Some say letting phone users see who’s calling before they answer would cut crank calls. Others question privacy issues.

It has been described as the telephonic equivalent of a front-door peephole--something that lets users see who’s calling before they answer.

Telephone companies say it would help cure the problems of bomb hoaxes and obscene calls. Opponents contend that it threatens nothing less than the constitutional right to privacy and could unleash an army of telemarketers on unsuspecting consumers.

The hot potato is caller identification, an optional service proposed by Pacific Bell, GTE California and Contel that would enable subscribers to see the number from which a call has been made before they pick up. It would initially be available only in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas but eventually would spread statewide.

Any day now, the state Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco will receive the recommendation of Administrative Law Judge John Lemke on how state regulators should handle Caller ID, as the product would be known in California. A 30-day comment period would follow before the PUC decides whether to adopt the recommendation.

Key issues will be the service’s cost and what sort of blocking mechanism phone companies might be ordered to provide to people who don’t want their numbers known--such as doctors, undercover police officers, battered wives and drug abusers calling a help hot line.

Although caller identification services have been up and running in a few other states for some time, some consumer advocates and privacy experts say the issue has not been debated widely enough for the full implications to be known. At the very least, by guarding the privacy of the person called rather than the caller, the service would mean a fundamental change in how we communicate.

“It really does change telephoning as we know it,” said Robert Ellis Smith, who publishes the Privacy Journal newsletter in Providence, R.I. “For the last 50 years, you could place a call anonymously.”

Smith said he can envision countless telemarketing calls directed at unsuspecting customers as businesses take advantage of the service to “capture” numbers and link them with other personal information in a database. Businesses with 800 and 900 lines have had that capability for years.

If the phone companies had their druthers, they would like to offer Caller ID with no blocking capabilities whatsoever, as the service operates in New Jersey. However, California is the only state with a law requiring that callers have at least the ability to block on a per-call basis, probably by dialing a special number code.

Toward Utility Rate Normalization, a consumer advocacy group in San Francisco, has lobbied for per-line blocking, so that customers could request that their numbers always be blocked without having to use a special code each time. The phone companies counter that that could defeat the service’s purpose.

The phone companies, which have proposed charging customers for blocking ability, would prefer a compromise, with per-call blocking for most customers and per-line blocking for special organizations such as shelters for battered women, said Kate Flynn, a spokeswoman in Pacific Bell’s Los Angeles office.

To some observers, Caller ID is nothing more than a logical step in technology’s march of progress. James E. Katz, a sociologist for Bellcore, the research arm of the Baby Bell companies, said he “can envision a system that would announce the caller’s name.”

Katz contends that the most important benefit would be that caller identification “would allow people to manage their incoming calls (and) get psychologically prepared.”

In New Jersey, he added, where the service has been available since 1987, New Jersey Bell officials say it has had a chilling effect on calls from harassers because of their fears of being identified--even though only about 5.5% of phone customers have subscribed.

Audrie Krause, executive director of TURN, said customers in Los Angeles and San Francisco will probably be especially sensitive to privacy concerns. The two cities have among the highest proportions of unlisted numbers in the country.

With those customers, “Caller ID would publicize a number that they’re paying (extra) to keep private,” she said.

She also noted that the service would be costly for subscribers (as much as $6.50 a month for residential users and $8 for business users) and would entail purchasing a separate piece of equipment to display the numbers (now about $50).

Other observers maintain that they can see both sides of the issue.

“Clearly, (Caller ID) could provide a useful service,” said Barbara O’Connor, a professor of communications at Cal State Sacramento. “But people get frightened of Big Brother.”

One thing is for sure, she added: “It is a hornet’s nest.”