covert%covert.DEC@decwrl.dec.com (John R. Covert) (03/16/89)
Date: 15 March 1989
To: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Department of Public Utilities
Boston, Massachusetts 02202
Re: New England Telephone Company -- CLASS Services
Calling Number Identification
CC: Attorney General's Office of Consumer Protection,
Utilities Division
From: John R. Covert, Consumer
New England Telephone has announced their intention to begin
providing a new family of telephone features called CLASS.
These features provide some useful enhancements to telephone
service, such as:
- The ability to cause a call trace record to be
generated by the telephone company for later inquiry,
- The ability to automatically return a call from the
last number which called a telephone,
- The ability to block incoming calls from a list of
one or more numbers,
- The ability to enable distinctive ringing for calls
from one or more numbers
All of the above mentioned features will be welcome additions
to the services offered by New England Telephone. However, one
additional feature is of significant concern:
- The ability for any subscriber to obtain the number
of the telephone which is currently calling.
There are serious privacy problems associated with providing
this information to anyone except law enforcement agencies.
A subscriber may wish to call a business to obtain information
about a product without that business automatically being able
to place the calling telephone number on a list for follow-up
sales calls.
A subscriber may wish to place a call from a private number,
and would like for the called party to return calls only to
a number specified by the caller, not necessarily the number
from which the call is currently being placed. For example,
a personal call made from a business number might properly
only be returned at home, or a business call made while at
home might properly only be returned to the business number.
-2-
A woman in a battered women's shelter may wish to call her
children without making it possible for her husband to
determine her location.
The Massachusetts DPU and Attorney General should study the
privacy implications of this feature. If calling number
display devices are to be permitted at all, subscribers must
be able to disable transmission of the number from which they
are calling, must be able to do this from any and all tele-
phones within the Commonwealth at no added cost, and must be
able to disable calling number transmission without remembering
to dial a special code before each call.
Sincerely,
John R. Covert