Notes from the Watertower

When is a phone number not a phone number?

When it’s going through the “Spook Call” service, of-course…

So this is a company, setup with the intention of letting you place a telephone call, but fake your caller ID number to the far-end. Not only that, but they’re offering a voice disguise function too.

Is this good? I don’t think so. It completely de-values caller ID, meaning that when someone calls you and you see their number (which might even go into your system and produce a name or even be integrated with your address book, or CRM system and produce more details), you can now no-longer rely on that number being who it says it is, and in todays world where we’re all fighting against identity theft, spam, and other nuisance phone calls, this is just too much.

A lot of people PAY BT, etc. for the privilege of receiving incoming caller-id too - are these people going to carry on paying for something that’s now a joke?

Fortunately “something’s being done” or at least it’s being brought to the attention of the press, MPs and so on.

For more reading, have a look at The Registers take on it, but for now, trusting incoming caller ID is going to be somewhat tricky now

Update: Friday 13th June

It looks like the Spook Call company have turned themselves off. Hurrah! (or words to that effect

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 11:04 am and is filed under Telecoms, Whinges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.