From: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 11:26 AM
Folk, the Caller-ID thread is bogus.
Not entirely. The other use case is people calling government services that
they want anonymity on. For example, someone calling a line to find out
about AIDS testing. You want people to be assured of anonymity at that
stage or they might not call. If they don't make that call, it's bad for
everyone. Same for domestic abuse and similar sensitive issues. Not to
mention government whistle blowers who need to remain anonymous to keep
their jobs.
There is no point in forging Caller-ID in order to fool marketers or the
like. They do not use caller-ID, they never have. The marketers
have always used AID which like Caller-ID provides the source of the call,
unlike Caller-ID it cannot be blocked, you do have to have a direct trunk
connection however and you have to do some translation to get a telephone
number from the line id.
I didn't know about that. At home, I never answer when the caller ID is
blocked. At work, I still get a fair number of calls with no caller-ID
information. Since a few of the cell-phone originated calls I get from
customers have no caller-ID information, for whatever reason, I have to
answer them all. (I suppose I could let the voice mail system take these
calls.) Some of these calls without caller-ID information turn out to be
marketing companies, so they are obviously not using the alternative system
you mentioned. Is that currently against the law? Is it different because
it is a business rather than residential?
What I find bizare however is the number of times you come across
a customer service tree that forces you to enter your account
number and then when you finally get through to a human they ask
you for the same information. Like why do companies buy equipement
that tells each of their customers that they are incompetent idiots?
One of my pet peeves, as well.
--
Seth Goodman