Luckily? Do you think that some sort of security is provided because Google doesn’t do reverse lookups?
I don’t mean to jump down your throat, but it’s not as though legions of Bad Guys are thwarted because Google won’t tell them where you live based on your phone number.
It used to be that telecom companies would publish books devoted to this sort of thing, and you could correlate names, addresses and phone numbers just by flipping through the pages of these books. And they were distributed to everyone in town for free! You can still get that information easily, if not through Google directly.
In all seriousness, it was a moderately big deal back in the day to have an unlisted number. Reverse lookups just aren’t that scary—unless they are, maybe because a violent ex is stalking you. But in that case, it’s not Google that’s keeping the creepy ex at bay. It’s the restraining order and the threat of arrest/imprisonment.
On my cellphone I block delivery of my number (not sure if I pay for this). My contacts are all entered as *86-xxx-xxx-xxxx, which allows delivery of my number, since my friends know my number already.
I occasionally make a call from my cellphone (don’t have a home landline) to a client from work. Some people have their phones configured to not accept calls from people who block delivery of their number. I cannot get through to them.
When I call them the next day from a work phone, I explain that their phone blocked my call. Some folks argue that I blocked them first. I sigh and explain that I do not want them to have my cell number. Some people see this as an insult. Life is hard.
Next to useless because of spoofing. There has been a scammer calling me several times a day, and it is always a spoofed name and number. It does no good to block a made-up name and number.
In light of telephone practices nowadays, you might want to rethink that. Nothing wrong with the idea, it’s just useless, and might inconvenience your business contacts without hurting the spammers at all.
Perhaps the reason you didn’t want to give out your private number is so it didn’t end up in some database used for unwanted calls. So if you restrict who knows this number, you are safer from those, right?
Not any more. Anyone who dials your number can call you, and always could. They don’t have to “know” the specific number, but just try every possible one in the 000 000-0000 to 999-999-9999 range, and one of them will be yours.
And that’s exactly how the robo-spammers work. They don’t check any database and don’t look at the DNC list. They call every possible set of digits. I guarantee your number is in that set. It’s all about volume, and spammers care about nothing else.
I have a landline and it still has caller id. Cell phones don’t have caller id because they have a different communication protocol. The signaling packets sent to cell phones don’t have support for caller id. A individual cell provider may come up with their own protocol to send caller id to their own phones, but cell phones without that support wouldn’t be able to understand it. So until the generic cell protocol is updated to support caller id, most cell phones won’t have caller id.
But even with landlines, there’s the issue going on right now that robospammers are spoofing caller id number. Often called “neighbor spoofing”, the spammer makes the caller id have the same area code and prefix as your own phone number. This makes the recipient think the call is from someone local. Often a name is not sent. But that doesn’t mean caller id is useless with a landline. Real callers will have their name and you should recognize that. But I suppose it’s just a matter of time before the robospammers start putting real names with the caller id and it’ll be harder to identify them.
On my iPhone, when I get “maybe:So and So,” it means that the phone recognizes the number from an email. It may pull information from other sources, too, (like maybe your calendar or something) but, in my case, it’s definitely from emails.
Nope, I’m happy with the way I do it. If I get a call and a name doesn’t show (not a contact), I do not answer, since I know it is a spammer. If a business contact somehow got my number, that would alter the situation enough to be a pain in my ass. They might call with a question and assume I’d listen to their voice-message and return their call. I don’t want that possibility.
I get spam calls every day, but I do not answer. Once a week or so I’ll open my voicemail and read, (Apple voice to text is great) delete, and block.
I also seldom pick up unknown numbers on cell and basically nobody ever answers our ‘landline’ (Ooma with the old landline number) phone. Real People can leave messages. We keep the landline number basically to give it to people we don’t want to talk to. But gradually the number of spam calls on my cell has still increased to now sometimes several per day, but in cycles. I block them, but that only helps somewhat if at all.
And yesterday I got a call on my cell showing my own cell number as the incoming number. I guess that’s a cute technique to try to get you to pick and ask ‘what the hell?’. But it shows how completely the phone scammer/spammers have undermined caller id.
Yeah, I got one of those years back! I can’t tell if it’s just coincidence or purposefully made to elicit a WTF reaction. It’s common for spammers to call you spoofing a number that is your area code, your exchange, and then a randomized last four digits of the number. So I wonder if it was intentional, or whether just coincidence that my number and the randomized last four digits matched. At any rate, I actually have all calls from my area code and exchange blocked using an app, and that’s cut down on this kind of crap tremendously. I used to get a call every day to two days “from” those numbers. Now, nothing. I know I may be risking missing a call from a legitimate potential client from a number that mirrors my area code and exchange, but I’ll take the risk (and I think it still sends the call to voicemail.)
Spoofing should not even be possible. That’s 100% the fault of the phone carriers. They built that capability into their systems. There is no legitimate reason for anyone to be able falsify the number they are calling from.
It is useful to me because if I don’t recognize the name I don’t answer it. Sometimes people or companies I know call me and I want to talk to them but their name is not in my contacts list.
On one day last week, my wife (who was home that day) told me that, over the course of the day, our land-line phone received seven calls from a spoofer that was specifically showing as our own phone number on the Caller ID. Given that we’re close to the election, I figured that it was some sort of political call.
kayaker, you do realize that you’re getting upset at people for responding to calls in exactly the same way that you do, right?
On another note, what exactly is prefix spoofing supposed to accomplish? Back in the day when people actually knew each others’ phone numbers (instead of storing them on your phone and forgetting about it), I don’t think I knew anyone who had the same prefix as us. If I saw an incoming number with the same prefix, I wouldn’t assume it was someone I knew. I’d know right away that it wasn’t, because I’d have remembered if someone had the same prefix.
And of course, it’s really easy now that I have a cell phone from when I was living in another state. If I get a phone call from 406 (Montana), there are only three possibilities: It’s a spoof, it’s a wrong number, or it’s the alumni office, all three of which I’m fine with not answering. On the other hand, if I get a call from 216 (Cleveland) or 440 (most of the Cleveland suburbs), it’s probably legitimate.
No. Someone wants to speak with me. Rather than making them wait until the next day, my receptionist will offer to have me call them, and she explains that I’ll be calling from my personal phone which has caller ID blocked. If they will not accept that as a condition of my calling them, they can wait until tomorrow and I’ll call from a phone at work.
My understanding is that it’s done under the supposition that some people will be more likely to answer a random call if they think it’s from someone local to them (i.e., “maybe it’s a neighbor” / “maybe it’s a potential customer”). I’m going to guess that it works, to a certain extent, because it’s become tremendously common over the past year.
But, exactly because it’s become so common (and because most people are getting wise to it), the spammers are probably quickly burning out the effectiveness of it. This suggests to me that they’ll move on to a different (and perhaps even more obnoxious) tactic before too much longer.
I still have a landline and caller ID still works and is free.
I also have a cell phone and all I would normally just get the phone number, unless the number is in my contacts.
Non-GQ answer: There is an app called Hiya available for Android (and maybe iOS, I haven’t checked) that provides as much caller ID as possible using their own database plus crowd-sourced results. I believe it’s the same service that Samsung uses, and at least one or two of the big US carriers. So, I don’t think there’s really any reason to pay for that service on your cell phone. The other advantage is that they know a lot of numbers that have been reported as spam and will block those.
Pretty much my thoughts, exactly, except that, growing up with landlines, the prefixes were tied to geography, at least loosely. There were only about a half dozen or so in the neighborhood. Now, it’s a free-for-all (well, not completely. Landlines still seem to be tied to geography, but cells can be almost anything) and when I see my cell phone exchange prefix spoofed, I assume it’s a fake. Anyhow, here’s a thread I started about it last year.
Actually, they never completely were. And they are definitely not now. A landline user can port their old telephone number to their new location, etc. And there’s all sorts of other methods where a landline number doesn’t relate to location.
E.g., going way back, there was a service for businesses where they would buy a number in a different area and have it routed it to their own lines. This way someone looking up a number might see a local call (and more importantly, quite often, pay for a local call) and be more inclined to call that business.
With the explosion of types of calling and services, the variety of ways one can do these sort of things with a landline has grown.
