Extract from David Kalat’s article “Nervous System: Who Ya Gonna Call—and Who’s Calling You?”
With the aggressive pace of technological change and the onslaught of news regarding data breaches, cyberattacks and technological threats to privacy and security, it is easy to assume these are fundamentally new threats. The pace of technological change is slower than it feels, and many seemingly new categories of threats have been with us longer than we remember.
Nervous System is a monthly series that approaches issues of data privacy and cybersecurity from the context of history—to look to the past for clues about how to interpret the present and prepare for the future.
Early telephony connected people who already knew each other through an intermediary who likely knew them both. That changed as telephone networks grew and brought tension between the needs for privacy versus screening one’s calls. Call screening would require transmitting to the receiver the identification of the originating call—that is, “Caller ID.” Making this work over a network that was never designed for such a thing would take creativity.
Essentially, implementing a method of caller identification meant overcoming three challenges: the basic technical challenge of establishing a process to signal the origin of a call; the logistical challenge in deploying that technical solution across networks; and perhaps thorniest of all, persuading a skeptical public that this technology was not a grievous privacy violation.
