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by dwc 2818 days ago
Spoofed Caller ID is a lie, not anonymity.

Here's a proposal: 1) Caller may choose to hide/suppress their Caller ID, 2) mandatory option for phone carriers to allow Callee to completely block calls (no ring, no voicemail) that don't carry Caller ID, 3) When present Caller ID must be accurate.

The above allows anonymity but disallows deceit. It also provides opt-out for people not to receive anonymous calls. (Anonymity does not give you the right to have any given individual listen to you)

We could have had this for ages, as there are no great technical hurdles.
2 comments
dwc 2818 days ago
Note on above: there are legitimate reasons for businesses to set Caller ID to something other than the call origin. But the "something other" should be selected from a set under the control of the business, not a free for all. I.e., a desk phone with DID may show as the main company number, etc.

This takes a little more work to account for, but it shouldn't be a roadblock.

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tomjen3 2818 days ago
No, a phone should give the exact number for that exact phone, since that is whom I want to call back, should I need to. That phone may be manned by more than one individual (in case of shift work), but nobody should have to go through a phone tree.
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softawre 2818 days ago
This won't work, contact centres are more complicated that you'd imagine.
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brownbat 2818 days ago
If we want authentication, public-private key pairs are a great idea.

A trusted network is fine, but are the telephone networks trusted? Can't get them to implement simple features in our interests, doesn't seem very much like a trusted third party to me. Meanwhile, OTT services work. Some let you whitelist contacts. Killer features like that will push everyone off POTS eventually anyway.

Inertia and legacy will keep holdouts using POTS, just like people still use fax machines, but they're mostly irrelevant.

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dwc 2817 days ago
> A trusted network is fine, but are the telephone networks trusted?

In the old days there was an assumption that if you were in the network then you were trusted, which was always dicey but made more sense when Ma Bell controlled everything tightly. Since the monopoly breakup that model was no longer true, and many problems can trace back to the nature of back patching security onto an entirely different model that no longer fits reality.

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