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CNID in the US and electronic tolls in Singapore
``` Date: Fri, 13 Oct 95 23:29 PDT From: privacy@vortex.com (PRIVACY Forum) To: PRIVACY-Forum-List@vortex.com Subject: PRIVACY Forum Digest V04 #22
PRIVACY Forum Digest Friday, 13 September 1995 Volume 04 : Issue 22
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Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 13:13:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: Beth Givens
Thanks to the many readers of this forum who have responded to my recent posting asking how Caller ID works in your states. (FYI, California is one of only two states which does not now have Caller ID, although it is likely to be offered here in the coming months.) The information you have provided is most useful.
You might be interested in a recent Caller ID story from Missouri. Southwestern Bell, the major local telephone company in that state, recently announced a new service called Caller Intellidata, which would be available to businesses. It is essentially "an embellishment of Caller ID," according to Jerri Stroud, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She described the service in stories appearing October 5 and 6, 1995. Here are excerpts:
"The new service would package the Caller ID information with the caller's address and demographic information compiled by Equifax Inc., a national credit reporting and information service....
"Bell proposes to sell businesses monthly reports about their callers. The reports would include the date and time of each call, the caller's name, telephone number, street address, city, state, nine-digit zip code and whether the number is a resident or business....
"The company would also give businesses a statistical profile of their customers as a group, using demographic information from Equifax...The information would include income, lifestyle, education, neighborhood and other information from census reports. A Bell spokesman said the demographic information cannot be tied to a specific caller..."
The Public Counsel for Missouri, Martha Hogerty, objected to the service, saying that it "smacks of Big Brother." She said "Consumers should not be forced to become statistics in a marketing study merely by placing a telephone call." She called the service "an abuse of the company's local telephone monopoly."
The next day Southwestern Bell withdrew its plans and said it would reintroduce Intellidata after the regulators have a chance to understand it better.
Apparently Caller Intellidata is already in place in other Southwestern Bell cities: Houston and Austin, Texas, and Wichita and Topeka, Kansas.
It should be noted that phone customers in the state of Missouri do not have the ability to use Per Line Blocking for their outgoing telephone numbers, only Per Call Blocking. This means that for each call they make, they must dial *67 before dialing the phone number in order to prevent their calling number ID from being transmitted to the display device of the call recipient.
In most other states, phone customers can sign up for Per Line Blocking, which automatically blocks every number from being delivered. Customers can unblock the number by entering another code before dialing the number.
Southwestern Bell's use of Caller ID data in its Caller Intellidata service is, I believe, a good indicator of what is yet to come on a much larger scale. This type of transaction-generated data is far too lucrative for business marketing applications to be allowed to be limited strictly to billing purposes.
One of the many things that concerns me about the proposed Southwestern Bell use of Caller ID data is that phone customers were apparently not going to be notified about the proposed usage. Nor were they going to be given the opportunity to opt-out of such usage. In addition, they do not even have the ability to put the Per Line Blocking feature on their phone line.
Beth Givens Voice: 619-260-4160 Project Director Fax: 619-298-5681 Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Hotline (Calif. only): Center for Public Interest Law 800-773-7748 University of San Diego 619-298-3396 (elsewhere) 5998 Alcala Park e-mail: bgivens@acusd.edu San Diego, CA 92110
[ In a phone conversation Beth and I had recently regarding this "service", a couple of other interesting points were discussed. First, while we assume that customers with non-published telephone numbers are protected from having their addresses disclosed by the telco, this is not made clear from available information regarding the service. Beth pointed out that such a service, at least in terms of the telephone company releasing customer addresses, would probably not be possible to such an extent in areas (such as California) where more stringent regulations concerning the release of customer information have been put into place. However, it is still possible that a great deal of information, much of it probably "stale" (inaccurate through age) might be tied to customer phone numbers through third party sources. -- MODERATOR ]
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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 09:49:39 +0100 From: agre@laforia.ibp.fr (Phil Agre) Subject: electronic road taxation in Singapore
The International Herald Tribune reports that the government of Singapore has awarded a S$197 million (US$140 million) contract to Philips Singapore, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Miyoshi Electronics, and its own Singapore Technologies group to build the first phase of an electronic system for automatic collection of taxes ("tolls") aimed at regulating demand for the country's road capacity. The full reference is:
Michael Richardson, Singapore moves toward electronic tolls for vehicles, International Herald Tribune, 10 October 1995, page 4.
Such systems have raised significant civil liberties concerns because, unless care is taken in their design, they can lead to the creation of electronic records of drivers' movements. The article does not comment on the civil liberties aspects of the Singapore system or on the Singapore government's highly controversial record on privacy and other civil liberties issues. It does say that the "smart cards", which "will be slotted into small holders mounted inside the windshield", will be debit cards from which "charges will be deducted from credit stored in the cards" by means of interactions with "electronic scanners mounted on gantries leading to congested areas and busy highways". It does not say how compliance with the system will be enforced.
Nonetheless, the system does create one clearly ominous precedent: these cards will be "installed on all of Singapore's 650,000 motor vehicles" (emphasis added). This kind of coercion is needed, for all practical purposes, to implement an electronic road-use taxation system, also known by the somewhat misleading term "congestion pricing". Transportation officials in the United States have repeatedly asserted that such systems in this country will be "voluntary", yet moves toward congestion pricing are under way in several parts of the country. It is not at all clear how these two trends will be reconciled -- unless, of course, submitting to electronic monitoring of one's road travel is "voluntary" in just the same sense that driving a car at all is voluntary. In any event, the developments in Singapore redouble the urgent need to develop, implement, and standardize technologies for anonymous electronic toll collection systems.
Phil Agre
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End of PRIVACY Forum Digest 04.22
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