Re: Requirements Document

To be more precise on what I said (or meant to say):

- Emergency call services are a requirement for deploying Internet
telephony.

- In PSTN emergency call services, callers know (or should know) that
dialing 911 or 112 or whatever means that they agree and consent to have
their calling number and possibly their location revealed to the public
safety answering point (or the equivalent in other countries).

For example, even with caller id disabled, the calling number will be
delivered. I'm reasonably certain that this is true for GSM, for
example, beyond the US.

This is thus implied voluntary disclosure, not fundamentally different
than, say, including your address to your email signature. I'd be
curious where the law is different in this respect. After all, in almost
all cases the caller would want to make sure that the location is
reported accurately, even when the caller is confused, unable to speak
or in a friend's house without precise knowledge of the current address.
If you don't like the policy, call the regular police or fire department
number - thus, this gives you "privacy management".

(As a side note, the various "drop a dime on crime" hot lines do allow
the police to see your calling number, as with any 'freephone' number.
You have to trust them to maintain your anonymity. That's clearly not a
particularly good design, but inherent in the notion of 800# - you want
free calls, you lose your anonymity.)

As far as the working group is concerned, my primary issue is that there
a circumstances where voluntary disclosure of location information is
common, either explicitly (e.g., by configuring some piece of software
to send a header or include an email signature) or implicitly (by
calling a certain number). I would be curious what kind of 'privacy
management' people have in mind for these cases. Clearly, it is useful
to the extent possible to ascertain that one is indeed conveying this
information to a desired party and only to such a party, but this may
not be easy to do in practice, particularly where privacy competes with
other goals, such as robustness and minimal configuration. (For example,
one could imagine a global private/public key pair for all emergency
call systems, but distributing a single private key to thousands of
locations across the globe raises some serious issues as to how long it
will stay secret. A level of indirection would be needed, through some
form of CA.)

Randy Bush wrote:
>
> >> During the meeting Henning talked about the urgency of this
> >> WG's business but I could not catch his reasons. Why?
> > Regulations in the US (specifically - but also elsewhere) requiring
> > the sending of location information during emergency (911) calls.
>
> and case-law elsewhere on the opposite. hence the need for privacy
> management.
>
> randy, who gets cautious when someone tells me i must hurry
Received on Thu Aug 16 22:59:56 2001