A new service just launched allows cellphone users to unmask the Caller ID on blocked incoming calls, obtaining the phone number, and in some cases the name and address, of the no-longer-anonymous caller.
The service, called TrapCall, is offered by New Jersey’s TelTech systems, the company behind the controversial SpoofCard Caller ID spoofing service. The new service is likely to be even more controversial — and popular.
“What’s really interesting is that they’ve totally taken the privacy out of Caller ID,” says hacker Kevin Mitnick, who alpha-tested the service.
I’d say – more accurately – they’ve taken the anonymity out of Caller ID. Why should “privacy” calling someone be a right?
TrapCall’s basic unmasking service is free, and includes the option of blacklisting unwanted callers by phone number. It also allows you to listen to your voicemail over the web. It’s currently available to AT&T and T-Mobile subscribers, with support for the other major carriers due within weeks, says TelTech president Meir Cohen.
“It’s not meant for spies, it’s not meant for geeks, it’s not meant for any specific target audience,” Cohen says. “Everybody hates getting blocked calls, and in this day and age they want to know who’s calling, and they want the option of taking the call or not.”
Does this mean you can tell it is the collection agency calling again and ignore the call?
Yes, exactly.
It’s about time.
If somebody showed up at your front door in a mask would, should you, open the door? Hell naw.
If you call me you better identify yourself…you goddamn f*!&g piece of s&%t telemarketer assh()les.
This is great. Hopefully all phone companies will include this in all phone systems. It has always teed me off that some assholes can mess with me and not say who they are. Caller ID is good, blocking it is stupid.
If you don’t want me to know who you are, then don’t call me.
> I’d say – more accurately – they’ve taken the
> anonymity out of Caller ID. Why should “privacy”
> calling someone be a right?
Yes and no. There is no _reason_ why one would need it when calling a private person.
But there are situations where someone would _need_ the right be remain anonymous.
Consider someone who is calling the police to give a anonymous tip.
Or a whistle blower calling a newspaper.
There are legitimate reasons for wanting to block your phone number. My wife is a volunteer working with young offenders and if she needs to phone someone from our home phone, she uses call block. She has no desire to have some of these offenders know her last name or phone number. Now she’ll need to make all calls from the office phone.
Not as bad as airports with their new scanners going nationwide.
Let’s ban anonymous calls. I will let it go to voice mail if the caller id is blocked. If it is important they will leave a message.
As for medical personnel and domestic violence victims, John C Dvorak has always had the solution to this. He buys a throwaway phone. These can be had with cash. Even the cards can be had with cash. You can always give a fake name when you have these phones activated. You can throw it away when the heat is on. An anonymous call will just cost you about $50.00.
Does this mean Caller ID becomes obsolete or free because it no longer does what its supposed to? Or more likely we now get to be charged for counter-counter-counter-counter technology.
RBG
Where are all the “Right to be Anonymous” posters today?????
Just expand the “feelings” you get from this post. The very same feelings apply to “any” area of privacy. Its an affront to everyone else’s legitimate need to know who they are dealing with.
Let the sunshine into your own life and act as if everyone knew who you were. Would you change a few things? Yes/No–both revealing.
Yes==an insightful honest person capable of empathy.
No==a liar.
bobbo. Hear me now, believe me later. Anonymity on the internet will disappear soon as technology catches up and the sheriff rides into town.
RBG
I put Caller-ID on the family line when the father of one of my daughter’s girlfriends decided that calling here about seven times in 30 minutes to ask my wife where his daughter was was a good idea.
I was trying to get a little work done before supper, and nobody else was home. He kept leaving essentially the same voice mail, on both the family and business lines….
Next day, Caller-ID was ordered….
My “rule”, which is fairly inflexible, is that if a call is blocked, or one of those “Toll Free Call” types, I just let it go to voice mail. I can check later if I want to. Mostly, I don’t, and most of them either don’t leave an intelligible message, or are clearly bogus. Once in a while it’s my sister :)….
(The telemarketers are not supposed to call cellphones at all, but in some cases, I wonder if the resources exist to avoid that. People gotta make a living, but….)
Lots of flagrant violations of the “Do Not Call” list, and some nasty zingers in there that essentially say that if you buy at Sears, and don’t tell ’em not to, they can sell your name & number to some Call Center who will happily tell you about all kinds of products you can’t live without, usually at suppertime….
My voice mail announcement includes “If you’re a telemarketer, please remove us from your list.” Doesn’t seem to work consistently, but it may help. Problem is that the message is actually not always heard by a human. A “computer” (dialer) calls and then, if you pick up, flips you to the next available telemarketer in a center. Which is why you sometimes get “dead air” because the computer had nobody to send you to.
(I wonder how many telemarketers get to hear the tail end of an answering machine message when the dialer decides that there’s a human there?)
Which leads to two major gripes. The first is the “machine call” that just keeps on droning on whether you hang up or not, and ties up your line until the pitch is done. I once threatened to sue the local Telco about that. I had a sick kid at home, and just enough paranoia to not want to have to go out to the car to call 911 if something happened. Kid recovered, and I think such calls are now illegal, but….
And, then there’s the “machine” that notes that _something_ answered, and starts it’s pitch. If you check the voice mail, all you get is “… please press 1 now for important information about your credit account….” WHAT account? 🙁
Not to mention the idiots that called me about a dozen times, left nasty voice mail messages about credit & such, and then when I decided to call and set ’em straight (one of the calls mentioned a name that they wanted to talk to but didn’t live here), they wanted all kinds of personal information from me first.
I told them that they had two choices: Stop calling, or my Caller-ID records go right to the FCC. #3 was “tell me who you’re trying to reach” – I finally got enough out of them to suggest that they find a better phone number for “her”, or I’d call the FCC anyway….
And, yes, I’d like to be able to block my Caller-ID info on a call once in a while, but in almost 40 years of having my own number(s), I can count such instances on one hand. Non-issue for me, really, but the other side of it – the Law Enforcement Officer or related situations, and the ever-popular “rat on your neighbor” things, you probably should use a pay phone and hope there’s no security camera and nobody interested 🙁 ….
Regards,
#15–pedro==combating a fascist regime is a fight for honesty, transparency, and information, not one for secrecy and anonymity.
Its along the lines of “Never say Never.” As a revolutionary, you are very insightful and empathetic with the need to be anonymous.
Now, do you want to address the other 99.9% of applicable circumstances?
As long as the local landline company (Verizon) wants something like $17.99 a month for me to have caller id, AND they charge me a monthly fee for having an unlisted number, my landline will remain blocked. Yes, I have to dial *78 to reach my brother and a few others, but I almost never call any of them from home anyway.
For some reason, CID seems to come free with nearly all cell plans, but the carrier makes up for it with their own spam text messages.
I’m going to get me a carrier pigeon.
Annonymity has never been an easy thing, but if that’s what you’re looking for just;
Don’t use the internet, don’t use cellphones, don’t have a social life, and most importantly don’t leave the house.
Most people that think they need it, have psychological problems or are criminals.
My opinion, the caller has no more rights than the callee, they don’t have to identify, you don’t have to answer. Myself I would rather cellphone companies make an option to block all unidentified calls, I never answer them anyways.
#20–Pedro==thats true but my post was about the individuals relationship to his own desire for anonymity/privacy. Close, but a very different thing.
You are focusing on what the government does/doesn’t do. I am focusing on a person’s individual assessment of that and what it means to his own self awareness.
We all desire self awareness don’t we?
#18
Don’t bother with the pigeons, I shoot them around here. Gives new meaning to getting cutoff.
I use a calling card when I make calls from home on behalf of my business. My clients have told me it shows on Caller ID as an Ontario number. (Its the number of the calling card phone company.)
Ontario is over 1,000 miles from my current location.
Can this new system track back a call placed through a calling card?
#24–pedro==in the coming information age the phone card number will be matched to the serial numbers of the cash used to purchase the phones and those bills will be routinely scanned for any dna matching. Surely if there is any justice in the world, fully 50% of all anonymous cash transactions will be fully known.
First we had Caller ID. Then Caller ID Blocker. Now we got Caller ID Blocker Reinstater. Next we’ll get Caller ID Blocker Reinstater Overrider.
I like it. Its like me selling guns to one guy, while selling bullet-proof vests to his enemy. Then telling the first guy about his enemies’ vests and urging him to buy bigger guns. Then I sell “Better and Improved!” vests to the enemy. And so on. I could keep it going forever!
Their implementation seems a bit half-assed: No wonder Mitch is the only guy who would put his name on it.
#26 “First we had Caller ID. Then Caller ID Blocker. Now we got Caller ID Blocker Reinstater. Next we’ll get Caller ID Blocker Reinstater Overrider.”
LMFAO! Isn’t technology great? I’m sure Adam Curry would think this is all a big conspiracy to generate revenue with more service fees. Heck, one doesn’t have to be that big of a conspiracy theorist to come up with that one.
It’s funny how few of the jerks who say there should be no privacy posted under nicknames.
When the spanish(only) recordings stop calling me on my cellphone in the middle of my workday, then I’ll feel less hostile to blocked or unidentified numbers.
KarmaBaby said,
“First we had Caller ID. Then Caller ID Blocker. Now we got Caller ID Blocker Reinstater. Next we’ll get Caller ID Blocker Reinstater Overrider.”
You beat me to it, KarmaBaby, though I would precede that sequence with the state when we just talked with no ability to ID the caller, in The Good Old Days. I think the telco is playing us all for fools, to get more revenue outta us.
This story isn’t accurate.
The calling party-ID is transmitted along with a presentation restriction flag set to “yes”. All they are doing is not honoring the presentation flag in the initial address message. This is a violation of FCC rules and as such, this company will eventually get shut down.
Here in Texas, what they are doing is also a violation of the law. You have the right to make a private call. The (stupid) person on the other end can either answer it or let it go.
I can’t believe for one minute that our friends at Verizon and AT&T (death-star) would support this. They would/will get sued out of existence.
There are other ways to strip out the Calling Party Number, as well as the Billing Number. Easy, very easy.
I personally have my calling party number sent, but I have the name changed to show “Wireless Caller”. Sometimes I use my personal mobile phone for business. I don’t want my name plastered all over the place. I could careless about the number.
Stop crying like little babies on the inter-web tubes, and complain to your carrier(s), the FCC, and your local PUC.
OUT! (oh this call was recorded for training purposes)
My mother is repeatedly getting harrassed by some jackass scammer using these stupid spoof cards. The fake number is (408) 123-1234.
He calls her cell phone and tells her she has been randomly selected to receive 500 free minutes. The proceeds to ask for all kinds of private information.
She tells him that she is not interested and tells him to stop harrassing her, but he gets rude. She hangs up on him. But he keeps calling back. He won’t leave her alone.
AT&T is useless. They say there is nothing they can do, unless she pays to create a block number list. But that won’t work, because its obviously not a real phone number. All he has to do is fake another number and harrass her.
Can’t anyone put this damned spoof card company out of business???