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Scoundreller

As I’ve said before: pagers are great: batteries last months. Easy to pass around and know when you’re the one on-call.

Limited teaching required to understand their use.

Can take a beating.

Work well in disaster scenarios because its network is far less fragile than the cellular network’s.

They don’t leak your location.

Their signal penetrates extremely well.

They make sure the person on-call doesn’t go too far from where they’re supposed to be on-call when they’re required to be within x km of base.

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But they have major drawbacks, too. Like: no encryption and authentication. And that means that e.g. critical medical data about a lot of people can be trivially snooped from the airwaves. This is not just hypothetical, it really works, and you can find multiple newspaper articles and reports online on this subject by googling a bit.

Worse, it is trivial to tamper with this and insert forged pager messages. A lot of harm could be done with this, possibly even leading to death of patients.

What medical data is sent via pages? All the times I've used them it is a simple code, and possibly a location.

A recent Canadian example:

> The data being broadcast includes the patients name, age, gender marker, diagnosis, their attending doctor and room number. Other broadcasts regarding medical tests such as x-rays are often associated with a patients last name or medical number, exposing their progression through hospital departments.

https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discover...

So don't include information that isn't necessary. rm name/age/gender.

If it's the organization's in-house medical number, that should be okay. It's literally a random identifier number. Or better yet, use a visit number, test number or result number to avoid linking them together.

> And that means that e.g. critical medical data about a lot of people can be trivially snooped from the airwaves.

Extending the model beyond "Call this extension" starts to go awry. There are ways of maintaining privacy: just don't connect the personal info with an identity. Yes, I know stuff like this can be deanonymized, but you need a lot of data to do so. "Consult requested for patient 432432434" or "Check results for 34334343" or "Consult required in 4W-34"

I have a cellphone in my pocket just like almost everyone else in the US. Our ticketing and notification systems are scheduled based so on call people do not have to pas around anything. If the schedule says you’re on call then you will get “paged” if an incident with a high priority comes into our queue.

There are non-technical people that are on-call and still barely know how to use a smartphone.

You could fairly easily set up a similar system based on plain old phone calls. Just have a lookup on who's on-call and have the system ring their phone. It'd be a trivial 20 line script given access to the db that stores that info and a twilio account or equivalent.

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