Your caller ID might be telling on you
Don’t look now, but I can see the digital backend of your life.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Additional reporting credit: my mom. —Kate
I almost never pick up a phone call from a number I don’t know. The idea of speaking to a stranger on the phone is as anxiety-inducing to me as the thought of being in a snake pit with them. It’s partly, of course, to do with not knowing who might be on the other end. Apple attempts to solve this by combing through details in your emails and messages, which is why you might sometimes get a call from “Maybe: John.” More recently, though, there’s the “Caller ID Display Name” that a mobile phone carrier sometimes suggests under a number that is not saved in your contacts.
But maybe you’ve noticed the same thing that I have: The names associated with these numbers are not always the names of the people calling me. Instead, I sometimes see the name of their mom. Or dad. Or partner. Or whoever, if I had to guess, pays for their phone plan.
When I have noticed this, it’s often in a scenario that I assume would be unwanted or embarrassing for the caller. In one case, a person was ID’d as their deadname. In two other cases my editors at Very Prestigious Outlets were identified as their fathers. It’s not shameful to share a phone plan with your parents (I insist loudly), but at the same time, it was kind of funny to discover that these people do.
I wondered: Shouldn’t carriers be able to identify who is actually calling? So I asked my mom. She looked into our family account, and while she doesn’t have any memory of manually editing them, all the lines on our plan are associated with the correct caller ID. It’s possible that they were filled in automatically, but not every carrier does this, and if they don’t, you would only know that your caller ID is incorrect if the person picking up your call decides to tell you—and since they’d almost certainly be a stranger to you, they probably won’t.
There are so many different carriers and so many different caller ID policies and tools that I can’t say for certain that there’s one explanation for these mix-ups. If you’ve gotten a new number recently, for instance, your caller ID might still be associated with the previous owner. But I’m certain this information is often getting scrambled—why else would a person’s name be superseded by one of their parent’s?
The younger people are, the more likely it is that they’re still clinging on to the plan that one their parents set them up with. But that’s not the only reason for the phenomenon. When a PR person recently called to yell at me for a story that I wrote, the name that showed up under his number belonged to his wife.
None of this is that embarrassing. What is there for people to make fun of, really? “Oh, that’s your mom’s name? Now I know you have a mom—nice mom, dude.” But neglecting to make sure your caller ID information is correct—probably because you, like me, didn’t realize that this was a thing—can do more than just subtly undermine your authority. A person you call might Google the name that incorrectly shows up under your number and stumble into more information than, say, an angry PR person might want you to know about his life. Maybe he’s private on Instagram, but his wife is not. In five seconds, you might discover way more than a caller had consented for you to learn about them from a single outgoing phone call.
This is one of many ways that the embarrassing digital backends of our lives sometimes bubble into public view. For example, when you accidentally send a text from your email—when that happened to one of my friends, we discovered that her email address, the same one she first made as a tween, is an extremely earnest reference to Harry Potter. She is absolutely mortified every time it happens and I treasure it deeply. It’s this weird bit of intimacy that, accidental as it may be, makes the person on the other end of the phone just a little more human.