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1994-07-17
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The following is a collection of all the postings that have appeared in the
RISKS Digest over the past couple weeks on the subject of Automatic Number
Identification and related telecom issues. I thought it was worthwhile to
get this info into the Telecom archives in addition to its being in RISKS.
It appears the discussion has ended on RISKS, so I'm sending this now.
There's enough of it that the moderator may want to make it an FTP-able
file instead of sending out to the list.
Regards, Will Martin
*********
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 88 09:10:40 PDT
From: jon@june.cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky)
Subject: "Pizzamation" traces phone calls, matches addresses
Excerpted from a story in THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER,
18 August 1988, pps. B5 and B8:
CHAINS ARE PUTTING THE BYTE ON PIZZA DELIVERIES by Jim Erickson
Tim Turnpaugh was caught off guard recently when he telephoned for a pizza
to be delivered to his home. When he got the pizza company on the line,
the person taking orders greeted him by name like an old friend -- before
Turnpaugh could identify himself -- and cheerily asked if he'd like the same
toppings he asked for on a previous order.
"I didn't have to give them directions to my house, nothing," he said.
Everything the company needed to know was gathered during a previous purchase
and stored in the memory of a computer, ready for instant regurgitation.
This is the brave new world of pizzamation.
Godfather's pizza in Washington [state] is one such firm on the cutting edge
of pizza technology. Inside a gray-walled, nondescript building in a
Renton [Seattle suburb] business park, 80 desktop computers are lined up in
rows at Godfather's state communications center. Not a single pizza oven is
in sight. On a hectic Friday night, as many as 50 part-time employees sit in
front of the tricolor screens, taking orders. ... If you've called before,
the computer instantly identifies and recognizes your telephone number, and
retrieves information from previous orders. "Customers don't even know a
lot of the time they've reached a centralized system," said Donna Brown,
manager of the center. "They still think they're calling a local restaurant."
...
After the order is placed, the computer decides which of 51 restaurants or
outlets in Western Washington, or 10 in Eastern Washington, is closest to the
customer. The computer totals the price and relays the order and delivery
instructions to the kitchen of a restaurant or outlet, where it comes out on
a network printer. ...
Brown said the system allows the company to keep track of sales data, and
since it records addresses -- more than 500,000 are stored in Godfather's
memory banks -- it can be used for direct-mail marketing. ...
Cathy Nichols, owner of four franchised Domino's Pizza stores in Renton
and Maple Valley, installed computers early this year ... Since the computer
matches phone numbers with addresses, it also helps smoke out young pranksters
who habitually order unwanted pizzas for the unsuspecting. ...
[Not if they are smart enough to read a phone book. PGN]
Some customers may worry that their local pizza retailer may be keeping records
on their eating habits as well as detailed directions to their house. It can
be unsettling to think that the Big Cheese is watching you. Nichols
acknowledged that large, centralized systems are "kind of scary." "There's one
number in the state that you call, and they know everything about you."
Bill Brown of Godfather's said she could recall only three people who asked
that their records be purged, and only because they didn't want to wind up
on mailing lists. Their records were immediately removed, she said, adding
that Godfather's does not sell its mailing list to other companies.
[This is the first confirmed report I have seen of marketing outfits tracing
calls, although I have heard rumors of other systems in which calling an 800-
number in response to some promotion would put your phone number on a list that
would later be matched in order to derive your name and address. It is my
observation that most people believe that "tracing a call" is still a
difficult, time consuming process that cannot be done routinely. This story
shows that it is a service phone companies offer to commercial customers,
although I have not seen any reports of it also being offered to residential
customers (who would then be able to ignore calls from marketers, cranks, etc.)
Jonathan Jacky, University of Washington]
[In an unrelated development, some of the pizza outfitters are selling
leather pizza outfits -- that is, protective clothing for the pizzas. If
the pizza chains are going into leather, maybe S&M now stands for salami
and mushrooms. PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 88 22:22:08 EDT
From: Mark W. Eichin <eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Calling party identification
>... It is my observation that most people believe that "tracing a call" is
>still a difficult, time consuming process that cannot be done routinely. This
>story shows that it is a service phone companies offer to commercial
>customers, although I have not seen any reports of it also being offered to
>residential customers ...
I believe the New Jersey telco offered digital display of incoming number to
private subscribers a year ago; here at MIT, with the installation of a 5ESS
system with full ISDN support available to offices, the digital set
automatically displays the phone number the call came from (if it was within
MIT; apparently there isn't software in place to track calls from other
switches yet, the display merely indicates "Outside"). The documentation for
the dormitory phones included mention of a ``privacy code'' which meant dialing
65 before any phone number; the pamphlet with the phone didn't actually explain
what the privacy code *did* however.
Mark Eichin, SIPB Member & Project Athena ``Watchmaker''
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 88 22:42 EDT
From: TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.ARPA
Subject: Calling party identification Phone number tracing
Our local cable company must use the same kind of connection to the phone
company that the pizza place mentioned in RISKS-7.42 does. They have several
pay-by-view channels and a set of incoming phone numbers. To order a
pay-by-view event all you do is dial something like 938-77xx where the xx is
the "ordering" code for the particular movie or live event (local sports, etc.)
you want. A computer answers the call and is somehow told where the call was
from; it looks that up in a data base, finds the i.d. of your cable box and
enables the show. (It goes on your bill, of course.) Rather clever, actually:
no human operators and it works from either a dial phone or a touch tone phone.
Don't use it much, and apart from misdialling the only "risk" I have is
remembering to use line 1 rather than line 2.
Ted Lee
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 88 19:57:52 xDT
From: [anonymous]
Subject: Calling party identification
While there is work going on to allow for the identification of calling parties
by the callee, such systems are not generally implemented and won't be for some
time to come. There are some limited test projects, but I don't believe that
any large-scale operation of the sort implied is currently operational.
Most likely what is actually happening is that the first question people are
asked when they call the pizza folks is "what is your phone number?" Then
the computer operator punches that in and up pops all the info from any
previous call. It is unlikely that they are receiving the calling party's
number in realtime. It IS true that with some long-distance carriers' 800
callers numbers are made available to the callee, but this is done on a
billing cycle basis (i.e., in the billing statement) and not in realtime.
If it turns out the pizza folks ARE receiving the number ID in realtime,
then they are in one of the test g