Caller ID is a relatively new technology. It only dates back to the '90s. Caller ID was not possible until telephone switching equipment became computerized. If you look at old black and white crime movies you will see what it used to take to "trace" a call. You literally had to have people standing by at telephone "central offices", buildings full of complex electromechanical equipment. When he got the signal the technician would literally look at the equipment to follow the path of the telephone call. According to dialog in these old movies it typically took a minimum of two minutes to trace a call. And tracing was only possible if it was a local call.
The advent of computerized telephone equipment changed all this. First the industry had to change over to computer control of the telephone equipment. Then standardized methodology for doing a trace had to be developed. Finally a method of passing the trace information to a customer's phone had to be developed. But all that eventually happened. And when caller ID first rolled out it was very cool. A little display on your phone would show you the name and phone number of the caller. Back not so long ago this little trick seemed totally awesome. Now in the era of smart phones and Skype it doesn't seem like a big deal.
And it turns out that caller ID depends on a technology that is rapidly disappearing, the phone book. It took me a while to figure out that this connection existed but it does. I have a phone book but I believe it is now about three years old. (The phone company has stopped dropping a new one off every year.) Phone books used to be a cash cow. You got a set of "white pages", which cost the phone company a bundle of money to produce. But in exchange you also got a set of "yellow pages". And not so long ago yellow pages were a very effective method of advertising. So businesses signed up and paid through the nose to be prominently featured. And they frequently had to buy multiple ads to cover all of what we now call "search terms". You would want your pizza joint listed under "Pizza" and "Restaurant", for instance.
But it is now easier and more effective to do a search, on your computer (if you are an old fart like me), or on your smart phone (if you are not). So the value of putting an ad in the yellow pages has plummeted. And most businesses have figured that out. You are far better off putting your money into Google "adwords" instead. And with the plunge in revenue from yellow pages has come a plunge in interest in complete and accurate white pages by the phone companies. And that, in turn has become a problem for caller ID.
I am new to caller ID. First I didn't have a phone that would display caller ID information. Then it didn't seem worth the trouble. Finally I got fed up with all the nuisance phone calls I was getting. So I bit and got caller ID. I am looking at it with fresh eyes compared to someone who has had it for some time. And my conclusion is that it doesn't work nearly as well as it should. And it looks to me like the situation is only going to continue to get worse. So what's the problem?
Well, technically caller ID works just fine. Every single time the phone rings a "caller ID" informational display pops up on my phone. But the actual information is not very informative a lot of the time. The obvious problem is with "blocked" calls. A provision was put into the regulations that allowed a caller to block caller ID. The justification was to protect the privacy of single women living alone. But as far as I can tell anyone can have caller ID blocked.
This is actually a far smaller problem than you would expect. Most women have found that blocking caller ID is more trouble than it is worth so they don't bother. So I only occasionally see a "blocked" message come up on my display. It turns out their are better methods for hiding your identity. And I have trained the one person I know who has caller ID blocked to enter an "unblock caller ID for this call" code before she calls me. So "blocked" calls are not much of a problem. And to the extent this is a problem the impact is going down because fewer and fewer callers have blocking turned on.
There is a technical term for a much bigger problem with caller ID. The term is "spoofing". Spoofing covers any situation where the number shown is not the actual number of the calling phone. You would think that spoofing would be limited to spies and crooks. But it is actually in widespread use by many companies large and small. An obvious example is an "800" number. Free to the caller long distance has been around for a long time now. I even know of a situation where an individual had children scattered across the country. In order to encourage them to call home he got a personal 800 number. It cost little and had the desired result of causing his children to call home more often.
He was happy with the result (this was several years ago) but cost of long distance has dropped so much it would hardly be worth the trouble now. So what's the point? The point is that no phone line is ever actually assigned an 800 number. The 800 number is an "overlay". Some computer somewhere in the phone network replaces the 800 number you dial with an actual phone number. The call is completed to this normal number, which you never see. But many calls I get from companies show an 800 number on the caller ID display. Any time I see an 800 number I know the call has been spoofed.
Now this is not necessarily a problem. In most cases if I call the 800 number I will get the company that called me. So this example of spoofing is harmless. The problem is that the "name" part of the caller ID display often does not show the name of the company. It often dumbly duplicates the same 800 number shown on the "number" line. So I don't know who's calling me without answering the phone. This even happened to me with a call from Bank of America. You'd think they would want me to know it was them calling.
So, to recapitulate, phone numbers are frequently spoofed by businesses. And I have even seen it done by very small businesses. And the number displayed is often an 800 number. That can be justified on the basis that it can make it more convenient for me, the customer, to get back to the company in question. But the point is that spoofing is common. So in many cases you can't trust the number caller ID displays. I know that I am being spoofed when I see an 800 number on the display. So I know a large number of caller ID displays are showing spoofed numbers. Do I know that the other numbers I see displayed are the number of the caller? No. It is possible (and likely in the case of the frequent "marketing" calls I get) that other numbers are being spoofed too. It's just that I can't immediately tell that this is happening.
So there is a big problem with spoofing the caller's number. There is an even bigger problem with the other piece of information caller ID is supposed to give you. There is frequently no name in the "name" field. I indicated above that my call from Bank of America just repeated the 800 number rather than saying "Bank of America". This is a particularly bad idea on their part. Over the years I have received many calls from "Rachel from cardholder services". I even wrote a blog post about it (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/02/rachel-from-cardholder-services.html). Rachel fronts for a scammer that wants me to switch to a different credit card. You would think that Bank of America would want to do everything they could to discourage this. But their legitimate call to me looked very much like a "scam" call.
So I see a lot of calls where the "name" field just repeats the information in the "number" field. This seems to happen most frequently with calls from businesses. But, since I no longer answer calls when I can't figure out who the caller is I don't really know. So repeating the number in the "name" field is a problem. But there is another problem with the information in the "name" field.
Frequently it contains just a "City ST" combination. I recently was called from "Rochester NY", for instance. I have received a number of calls from "Albuquerque NM" in the past few weeks. Apparently I have a fan base spread all across the country. Many of these calls are apparently from places where I know I don't know anyone. So it is easy to ignore those calls. But sometimes I bite and answer the phone. The "City ST" combination happens to match that of a distant friend or relative. So it might be a call from them. But when I do bite and answer it has often turned out to be a scam/marketing call. But not always.
Cell phones (or "mobile" phones, as most of the rest of the world calls them) routinely pop up with this same "City ST" type of display in the "name" field. In fact, I have never gotten a call from a cell phone where the person's name popped up. As far as I can tell cell providers never register a name for a cell phone number. I recently got my mother a prepaid phone. You can register them. When you do you provide the usual contact information. But in this case I could not change the name from "MOBILE USER" to that of my mother. Now the company involved (it was an AT&T "go phone") certainly knew my mother's address from the contact information I filled in on her behalf. They even would have had an email address except my mother doesn't have an email account. But they literally made it impossible to change the name on the account.
And this is where the death of white pages ties in. It is no longer important to have a phone book to look numbers up in. In fact, it is of decreasing importance to be able to look a person's number up online. So apparently cell phone companies have decided as a matter of policy to not publish name and address information for cell phones. And the world is increasingly going mobile. The number of people who only have a mobile is growing. Kids do it. But I know a number of budget challenged adults who have given up their land line to save money. They all feel that going "mobile only" is feasible but going "landline only" is not. My guess is that caller ID gets the name information from public directories (the online version of white pages). But more and more phone numbers are not listed in any public directories. So the percentage of the time that the "name" field in a caller ID entry has useful information is low and dropping and this makes caller ID less useful. The situation has gotten so bad that it is apparently cutting into the ability of the NSA to spy on us. A recent story (http://gizmodo.com/want-to-avoid-the-nsa-use-a-cell-phone-1518318611) reports that cell phones are giving the NSA fits.
My recent experience getting a prepaid phone for my mother allowed me to answer the burning question "are burner phones for real?" As anyone who has seen a cop show or a thriller recently knows, there is something called a "burner phone". It is a phone that can't be traced back to the user. And, since it is cheap and untraceable, it can be "burned" (thrown away) at any time. Lots of things that show up in entertainment pieces are fiction. It is way harder to crack encryption than the movies and TV lead you to believe. But it turns out that everything they say about burner phones is true. I bought my mother's phone at a drug store for cash. I put money into it using a credit card. So, with a little effort my mother's phone could be tracked back to me because I used my credit card. But I could have bought a prepaid card for cash and loaded money into the phone that way.
All the company wants is their money. If you buy the phone (for cash) and load money into the phone (say with a prepaid card bought with cash) then they get their money. So they don't care who you are or what you use the phone for. And that's a problem for the NSA. And its a problem for people like me who want to screen out nuisance calls using caller ID. The laws and regulations make all this legal. They could be changed. But the phone companies (and other businesses) are doing just fine with things as they are. So their lobbyists will make sure that the laws and regulations stay the way they are.
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