Over the past 35 years, views on privacy and Caller ID have flipped
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I distinctly remember people being a bit unnerved when I'd call them back and say "Hey, I saw you called...". My girlfriend at the time was particularly disturbed that I'd know she called even when she didn't leave a message. People were used to treating unanswered calls as if they never happened, and felt a bit violated when you knew that they had been investing effort into contacting you instead of making a casual "what's up?" call.
It's very strange to think about such attitudes in the context of modern communication. :)
I remember one of my local BBSes had a busted call back that would occasionally call multiple times or after a random (and often very long) delay.
So much of that era is just forgotten now (and that's not necessarily a bad thing...).
I use streak CRM for gmail and have learned to not mention the details of what I see so as to not freak people out. The funny thing is, I can see 0.00001% of what the commercial trackers can see, but people don't bat an eye on that. They allow images to appear on emails by default, they don't block javascript, they keep all the tracking cookies no their machine, etc.
I had a similar reaction - email open tracking is something you assume, by default, that regular individuals can't do. And I found it very invasive, even though I know the same tracking exists on all the non-personal email I received.
Since then I've made it a point not to open those invitations until I know I'm ready to respond - since "I never saw the email" is a less harmful conclusion for my snooping friend to draw than "I opened the email and decided not to respond."
Also, I don't get why I'm being downvoted.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_Name_Presentation
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_information_database
There were two opposing but very emotional factions.
One was a women's advocacy group saying that caller ID was bad because if a woman hiding from an abusive husband or boyfriend needed to make a call to him, her location would be revealed by caller ID. (See https://books.google.com/books?id=3IATAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA47&dq#v=... )
A second group, also advocating for women, claimed that Caller ID would allow women to know who was making abusive obscene phone calls.
Of course, we have Caller ID now, and it's generally liked by all.
For the youngsters, an answering machine was the precursor technology to voice mail. It was a hardware device that you installed on a landline--the only kind of phone line most people had--between the demarcation point and your phone handset, that automatically answered a phone call after a programmed number of rings. The machine then played the outgoing message, sounded a beep, and recorded the subsequent audio as an incoming message. The machine could be set to play the incoming audio through a speaker, and if the call was from a familiar source, the phone handset could then be picked up. This was referred to as "screening your calls".
Equally clearly, the superior cultural documentation for Caller ID is the Scream movies. Scream came out in 1996, and Scream 2 in 1997. Sydney did not have Caller ID in the first, and had purchased it by the second, to combat crank callers. After the release of Scream, Caller ID use tripled in the US. (That may be coincidental, attributable to the adoption rate of a new and useful technology.)
When the price came down it was worth it so that my mom could screen forced overtime calls. She was required to report to work if contact was made, so we basically didn't answer the phone at certain times! I remember coming back from college and my sister answered the phone on a Sunday night, and I was shocked.
Also, the mechanics of answering machines is why they have the “please leave the message after the beep.” The greeting was stored at the beginning of the tape (no solid state memory!), but there could be a lot of messages already on the machine. So the machine would rewind the tape to the beginning in standby mode, play the greeting, then fast forward to the first section of blank tape. Since this would be a variable amount of time, they played a beep so the caller knew when recording was starting. This could be a long wait for people with lots of messages. When the greeting could be stored in solid state, this was an advertised feature, as were the completely solid state machines.
Single-tape machines were basically extinct by the late 80s. By the 90s, they returned when the outgoing message was recorded to solid-state memory, and the incoming went to tape.
"Sorry, I was in a mine shaft"
In one of the later episodes a character has just left the room and as they are about to call him, the camera pans to his seat where he has left his flip-cell phone.
On display in this scene from The Terminator:
https://youtu.be/ASMnW0H5AAI?t=1m10s
This scene will also familiarize youngsters with a precursor device to the mobile phone known as a pay phone.
Housed in a "phone booth" that was sometimes used for quick clothes changes or time travel.
That's how voicemail still works on many DECT landline phones
"I know you called, I know you hung up my line, star 69"
(edited: 1994, not '95. The album was 94, the tour was 95.)
That was roughly between the minute following "Watson, I need you," and the minute after cable television companies started offering VoIP triple-play. (To be reintroduced with mobile text messaging and data charges, of course!)
This sort of business practice curtailed the adoption of a lot of useful features, Caller ID included. There were a lot of people still using rotary pulse dialing in the 80s, because the telcos charged a higher monthly price for DTMF touch-tone dialing.
When I left the industry, I left because all the profits went to the carriers and all the risk to us. From my perspective, VC money was funding the telcos. But an earlier thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was that the teclos were trying to white-label phones from then-unknowns like HTC (who ISTR was already white-labelling for Motorola and Nokia?) so that they didn't have to negotiate with the manufacturers over tech and prices. You would get exactly what the carrier wanted you to have and not one bit more.
This was just when the Razr phone had its first price drop, and rumors of the iPhone were beginning. This is definitely one time when a Cult of Personality saved us from something much worse.
That was only 10 years ago.
You're referring to this part of the article?
>> No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs,” featured a protagonist, Gwen Stefani, who was screening her phone calls—something made easier with Caller ID.
The article is correct, some of the lyrics explicitly refer to screening calls[1]:
"And it's all your fault/ I screen my phone calls/ No matter who calls/ I gotta screen my phone calls"
In common parlance, that means checking who's calling you before deciding if you'll take the call, which involves Caller ID. [2]
I don't know where you're getting the song being about implausible excuse from the caller -- the song is about Gwen not wanting to talk to someone who thinks she's interested (and Genius confirms):
"You think that we connect ... Your words walk right through my ears/ Presuming I like what I hear".
And later in verse 2:
"Don't have the courage inside me/ To tell you please let me be"
If you're referring to the "a likely story", look at the surrounding lines:
"Sorry I'm not home right now ... So leave a message and I'll call you back/ A likely story, but leave a message/ And I'll call you back."
That is, she's recognizing that her claim of not being available is implausible.
Finally, my love of that song paid off on HN!
[1] https://genius.com/No-doubt-spiderwebs-lyrics
[2] EDIT: A now-deleted reply pointed out that at the time it wouldn't be understood as referring to caller ID, as it wasn't very common to have, and most people screened by listening to the message. I stand corrected.
Still, the article only says that screening is made easier with caller ID, which is correct, and the song is still about screening calls because of unwanted attention, not, as was claimed, about the implausible content of said message.
GP is saying it's an implausible excuse from the callee.
Not true! "Screening your phone calls" in those days meant waiting for someone to start leaving a message on your answering machine, which you could hear in the room in real time [0], and then only picking up the phone if it was someone you wanted to talk to.
[0] Messages weren't left on a server that you'd access later. They were recorded on a physical tape in your house. You could hear the person leaving the message as they did it.
"Eh, you could argue it either way. Answering machines + Caller ID often used together."
"I added a line about Scream and gave "Spiderwebs" a little clarification. Thanks for keeping me honest!" + image of "Author's Note" at bottom of article.
The content of the song is that the singer just had a breakup, and recorded "a likely story" as the outgoing message on her answering machine, for the purpose of screening incoming calls. So when he calls, she won't pick up. "It's all your fault." Take it from someone who heard it over and over on the radio at the time it was released as a single.
Oh, I wasn't disputing that part, I just thought you were describing it as being about a message someone left on someone else's machine.
Then after some time they added an option for caller id subscribers that would block blocked numbers.
My dad had his outgoing caller id blocked for a long time and I remember having to dial *82 for almost everyone I called.
As the article mentions, you could dial the 67 prefix to block your outgoing caller ID on an individual call.
With the blocking-of-blocking, you had the opposite - the 82 prefix _disabled_ outgoing caller ID block on an individual call, allowing you to call subscribers that blocked blocked numbers.
I think my folks finally decided to drop the caller ID blocking after the phone company switched from 7-digit to mandatory 10-digit dialing for all calls. It was just too many digits to dial with the prefix, especially since half the time you would dial without the prefix, get the "blocked" message, then dial again with the prefix.
I'd like to see a service called 'Originating Number'.
Half the time when I call a company I have an ongoing relationship with, they have all of my information available. Half the time they don't.
ISPs and the phone company in particular stand out, as the question of "if we get disconnected can I call you back at this number?" vs, "what number should I call you back at?" to which I reply, "this number", followed by a pregnant pause, no reaction from them, so I say my phone number.
And for some reason I can't decide which one is more annoying.
We need to to remove the ability to spoof the calling number and we need to to require phone companies to penalize and terminate numbers that get reported for making spam calls.
Edit: My mistake, caller ID actually refers to the system that sends the phone number (and optionally the name) of the callar. The legislation that was passed doesn't se to prohibit the caller from blocking caller ID or even from spoofing the number, it requires phone companies to verify that number and notify the caller of it can't be verified. It also increases penalties and enforcement options/mandates against illegal robocallers and scammers
Alternatives might be for telcos to track caller reputation, or for there to be an additional trust/verification step for certain cases. For individual call recipients, that's the general problem currently. In the case of businesses, there are generally two problems introduced by Caller ID (or its lack):
1. Filtering out robocalls and spam / scam calls.
2. Preserving the privacy of other callers. For toll-free numbers, the caller's identity (or at least number) has long been available, ostensibly for billing purposes, but as a bit of tracking and marketing data was also a key selling point of such systems. Yes, you're paying for the call, but you're gaining valuable (to you, if not the caller) marketing data.
When Caller ID systems first went into place, that tracking information was a concern. Note that Caller ID blocking (an actual service) did not apply to 800 / toll-free numbers:
https://www.verizonwireless.com/businessportals/support/faqs...
Discussion of privacy issues here:
https://www.mightycall.com/blog/protecting-privacy-caller-id...
Not quite. Caller ID blocking works on toll-free numbers. The issue is that toll-free numbers have access to another system, ANI, which provides the originating phone number. It's also possible to get ANI on non-toll-free lines if you're willing to pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identificatio...