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 comp-privacy@pica.army.mil and administrative requests to comp-privacy-request@pica.army.mil. Back issues are available via anonymous ftp on ftp.pica.army.mil [129.139.160.133]. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1993 10:22:10 -0400 (EDT) From: "Tansin A. Darcos & Company" <0005066432@mcimail.com> Subject: Re: ANI From: Paul Robinson Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA ----- David Gast , 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 - TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1993 11:19:20 -0400 (EDT) From: "Tansin A. Darcos & Company" <0005066432@mcimail.com> Subject: Re: ANI From: Paul Robinson Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA ----- Christopher Zguris <0004854540@mcimail.com>, 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 - TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 Sep 93 12:28 EDT From: Lynn R Grant Subject: Re: ANI Thus sayeth Richard Roda : >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 Grant@Dockmaster.NCSC.MIL ------------------------------ Date: 02 Sep 1993 23:20:14 +0000 (GMT) From: Dick Rinewalt Subject: Re: ANI Organization: Texas Christian Univ Comp Sci Dept Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT In article John Higdon, john@zygot.ati.com 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 rinewalt@gamma.is.tcu.edu 817-921-7166 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 Sep 93 22:39:13 PDT From: Kelly Bert Manning Subject: Re: ANI Reply-To: ua602@freenet.victoria.bc.ca 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 ] ------------------------------ End of Computer Privacy Digest V3 #023 ******************************