Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/articles/cpd323.zip/CPD323.TXT

Text File | 1993-09-05 | 15KB | 329 lines

Computer Privacy Digest Fri, 03 Sep 93              Volume 3 : Issue: 023

Today's Topics:                Moderator: Dennis G. Rears

                                Re: ANI
                                Re: ANI
                                Re: ANI
                                Re: ANI
                                Re: ANI

   The Computer Privacy Digest is a forum for discussion on the
  effect of technology on privacy.  The digest is moderated and
  gatewayed into the USENET newsgroup comp.society.privacy
  (Moderated).  Submissions should be sent to
  [e-mail] and administrative requests to
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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1993 10:22:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Tansin A. Darcos & Company" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: ANI

From: Paul Robinson <[e-mail]>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA
 -----
David Gast <[e-mail]>, writes:

> Since ANI exists so that LECs (long distance companies like AT&T or
> MCI) can properly *bill* calls, there is no reason that ANI has to
> be provided to any recipient of any call, 800 number or regular
> number like [DELETED]  If no ANI were delivered to the recipient of
> a call, billing could still be done.  (Note: Even 900 numbers
> do not need ANI.   They could be required to negotiate a
> payment method at the time of the call.)

I believe ANI on calls has been available for more than TWENTY YEARS.
It has only been since the ordinary guy on the street has been able
to obtain the identifying number of a caller in real time that there
has been any bruhaha about this.  Large businesses have been able to
get real-time ANI by paying a small fortune.  It is only since people
discovered that their alleged private calls are not really private
that there has been any question about this.

> Further, I do not buy the argument that just because
> someone pays for an 800 call, they deserve to be able
> to invade my privacy.

Funny, but whenever someone calls collect, the called party is given
the number, just not in real time.  And on a third-party billing, the
number being billed gets to know *both* numbers.

> Sure, recipients often like to purchase this information anyway
> because information is power, but there is no reason, technical or
> otherwise, except for greed, that ANI has to be provided to the
> recipient of the call.

1.  A service for cable-tv for purchasing movies can be set up where
you dial a 1-800 number for that channel, and it automatically signs
up the user who's bill is connected to that channel, because it gets
the ANI of the caller.  I know people who use this service and
appreciate it because some drone clerk doesn't make a mistake and
miss the event.

2.  A company sets up a 1-800 number to allow its employees to
call in and check their voice mailboxes.  Someone else is using it
to try to hack onto their system.  The ANI tells them from where the
person is calling.  If the person is dialing through a diverter, it
at least tells them from what number to refuse to accept calls.

3.  The phone company implements the ability to call-forward
your telephone from someplace else.  With ANI, if the phone has
been fraudulently forwarded (by someone other than the owner) the
phone company can find out where.

Now of course, the fraud applications don't necessarily nail down
the person who is doing things from a pay phone, but where billing
fraud is a problem, inward calls can be refused from specific
numbers *but only if that site has real-time ANI*.  If you don't need
real-time ANI, you can get ANI listings with your phone bill from
many long-distance companies.

> > Now there really is very little the CRTC can do anyway, if the
> > 1-800 number is within the U.S., even assuming that this
> > capability is illegal, since the U.S. company is doing nothing
> > illegal under U.S. law, any more than the TV station in Canada
> > that broadcasts into the U.S. is not violating Canadian law even
> > though it is not licensed to broadcast on that station in the U.S.
>
> The CRTC could make it illegal to import or export ANI information.
> In fact, if the CRTC wants everyone in Canada to use a Canadian
> carrier, then blocking the export of ANI would help to achieve that
> restriction. Your analogy fails because it is technically
> impossible to have broadcasts stop at the boarder.  It is
> technically possible to prohibit the export of ANI.

And then the FCC can make it illegal to transport calls that routinely
refuse to provide ANI, or the interexchange company in the U.S. can
refuse to accept them.  The customer could claim that without the
billing information it has no way to know how many calls are actually
made to its number and how many are the imagination of the telephone
company.  Or companies can switch to accepting collect calls, and
collect calls have always delivered the calling party's number, just
not in real time.

Then what will happen is that companies will not be able to give
Canadian customers the same class of service that they can to American
customers.

You can't roll back the clock or put the genie back in the bottle.
The ability to identify someone who is calling has been reality for
more than twenty years.  The only difference is now the smaller
businesses and individuals can have the same capability that only
the "big boys" have had.   Right now, real-time ANI is expensive,
that could change as customers want that capabilty.

Someone might want to ask, why all this sudden fear of something that
has been status quo for twenty years or more?

---
Paul Robinson - [e-mail]



------------------------------

Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1993 11:19:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Tansin A. Darcos & Company" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: ANI

From: Paul Robinson <[e-mail]>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA
 -----
Christopher Zguris <[e-mail]>, writes:

> > for corporate accounts or people with more than one line,
> > there could be only one ANI for all the phone lines.
>   ---------------------------------------------------
>
> This doesn't make sense.

Yes it does.  Let's say I have a PBX at my office, and I purchase DID
service to allow people to receive calls directly at their desks.  Let's
say I have 100 people there.  I might have a block of 200 phone numbers,
but only 20 trunks (the extra numbers might be for the voice mail, fax
numbers, internal paging, house phones, etc.) Now, for outgoing numbers, I
might purchase ten outgoing trunk lines, ALL OF WHICH ARE ALIASED TO THE
MAIN SWITCHBOARD NUMBER for billing purposes, so I can get volume
discounts for all of my traffic by keying it all to one number.

All calls that are outgoing from my PBX will have the same ANI on
them.  My PBX knows who is dialing, so I know who to account for
each call.  To the rest of the universe, it looks like everyone in my
office uses the same telephone number to dial out from.

>  I have an 800 number and multiple lines in a hunt group. Are you
>  saying that no matter which line in the hunt group I call from to
>  an 800 number (or whatever we are talking about that uses ANI) the
>  main number in the hunt group will appear through ANI?

If they are separate lines from the phone company (or your phone
company supports PBX identificatiomn of originating subscriber) then
each number will be different.  If you are using an outgoing trunk
group that is all keyed to the same number, then yes, they would all
generate the same ANI number, the number assigned to the trunk.

> If ANI is used for billing purposes, than why do each of the lines
> in the hunt group generate their own long distance phone charges
> when the MCI bill comes in?

Because they are not using the same trunk group for outgoing calls;
each one is an individual number and each generates its own separate
ANI.

---
Paul Robinson - [e-mail]



------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 2 Sep 93 12:28 EDT
From:  Lynn R Grant <[e-mail]>
Subject:  Re: ANI


Thus sayeth Richard Roda <[e-mail]>:

>If you don't want your number delivered, then call the companies
>non-800 number and pay for the call yourself. ... After all,
>nobody forced you to call the 800 number.

Just a small point, but sometimes they *do* force you to call the
800 number.  I remember a taking a business trip to London while I
was in the middle of negotiating with the accounting department of
a large health club chain in the States.  (They had messed up my
membership somehow.)  They would leave messages on my answering
machine with an 800 return number.  I would call my answering machine
at home and get the messages, but I couldn't return the call, because
you can't call a U.S. 800 number from England (because the people you're
calling don't want to pick up the tab for a transatlantic call).

There was *no way* to place the call, because they had no non-800 number
listed.  I finally ended up calling my secretary and having her
call the place from stateside.

--Lynn Grant
  [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 02 Sep 1993 23:20:14 +0000 (GMT)
From: Dick Rinewalt <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: ANI
Organization: Texas Christian Univ Comp Sci Dept
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT

In article <[e-mail]> John Higdon,
[e-mail] writes:
> of Mr. Gast) that many who are vehemently against caller number
> identification in any form, ostensibly because businesses will abuse
> the information, see nothing wrong with scamming businesses with phoney
> information and the like. Could this be a more accurate motivation?

Neither Mr. Higdon nor ayone else to my knowledge has done a valid survey
of the motivations of users or providers of 800 services. Some providers
have legitimate reasons for wanting ANI. I have a good reason for wanting
to block ANI on *some* 800 calls.

> would not be possible otherwise. Yes, the carriers could be prohibited
> from delivering the information to the end user, but to what end? It

When I call a financial institution, for example, to request "free"
literature,
I feel that they have received ample return on their investment in the 800
service by being able to get their propoganda into the hands of someone
who is interested. But I do not want my evening interrupted a week later
by a call offering me an "opportunity" to invest in some flakey scheme.

> really is not necessary to accomodate those who feel that their phone
> numbers are a matter of national security. Those people can simply
> avoid calling others whom they do not wish to know their numbers.

At the risk of making another sweeping generalization, I contend that
most people do not know that the 800 provider gets the caller's number.
Mr. Higdon's simple solution is simplistic.

[Moderator's Note:  Mr. Higdon is a big time user of 800 services as well
as his clients.  I do not disagree with your contention that "most people
do not know that the 800 provider gets the caller's number".  I would
contend that 1) most people don't care 2) ignorance is bliss.  His
solution is simplistic but in reality that's the only solution.  The
delivery of ANI to 800/900 numbers is not going to stop because people
want it to stop. ._dennis ]

Dick Rinewalt      Computer Science Dept       Texas Christian Univ
[e-mail]                      817-921-7166

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 2 Sep 93 22:39:13 PDT
From: Kelly Bert Manning <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: ANI
Reply-To: [e-mail]


I didn't realize that I would generate such a lot of interest on this
with my original post. The response that suggested calling from a pay
phone seems to have given a good piece of advice about protecting privacy.
Unfortunately the general public can't do this if they don't know about ANI.

One point that didn't get mentioned is that the use of ANI to record
numbers allows the payer to prevent nuisance callers from programming
their modems to dial an expensive 800 number repeatedly. I think that
somebody did this to a tel-evangelist's 800 line some time ago with the
intent of costing him a lot of money. "Stopper" must do this because
they gave me a busy signal after the first call. I didn't have a pen
by the phone and they only mentioned the new caller ID demo number once
before they disconnected. I had to call from a pay phone to hear it again.

900 numbers cannot be used from here in BC. BC Tel terminated this
"service" after getting a lot of very bad publicity about teenagers
running up huge bills for dial-a-porn. I'm not sure why "Stopper"
includes BC in it's 800 advertising number service area since nobody
here can use their 900 number to block caller ID or ANI.

For what it is worth, BC Tel says that "Stopper" is using caller ID.
Their explanation is that US carriers are doing "ANI Spill", which seems
to be a tech talk way of saying that they use the ANI signal to recreate
the caller ID signal, even if it is surpressed.

Do carriers only provide ANI for 800 or 900 numbers, or could they be
using it on other numbers? My research on computer integrated telephony
turned up descriptions of systems that use ANI to pull customer data out
of a database so that telephone operators can answer the phone with hello
Mr/Mrs/Ms ..., as well as having the account details displayed on a
computer workstation without having to ask the customer for an account
identifier and key in the value.

Some of the respondents seemed quite adamant that whoever pays for the
800 call has the right to know the callers number. Isn't there an issue
of informed consent here? How can someone know to use a pay phone if they
have never heard of ANI and don't know that their number will be
transmitted by ANI and can be recorded?

Does paying for an 800/900 call give someone carte blance to do anything
they want with the callers number, such as using it to retrieve an address
from a reverse directory and peddling it to porno magazines as a hot sales
prospect?

In some cases 800 service numbers are mentioned in product documentation
as a selling point. If a customer buys a product on the basis of it being
warranted and backed up by an 800 support number haven't they already
paid for the 800 calls as an integral part of the product price?

[Moderator's Note:  Paying for it or not does not give "carte blance to
do anything they want with the callers number"  What give them carte
blance is the knowledge of the number.  Quite simple if you don't want
a party to know you phone number don't call them from that phone.
 ._dennis ]

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End of Computer Privacy Digest V3 #023
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