Where Would You Draw The Line On VoIP Privacy?

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Technology

September 15th, 2009

The Onion hit a nerve a few weeks ago, touting that Google’s privacy opt out option requires moving to a desolate village:

Funny as it is, it does raise a question: what would you consider as “privacy”.

I’d like to focus a bit more on my own area of interest – VoIP, and fine tune the question a bit: What Would You Consider as VoIP Privacy?

Privacy isn’t easy to achieve. I’ve already discussed the various pitfalls in implementing security in VoIP. Security is something that usually comes first to one’s mind, and security is an important building block in building privacy into any solution, especially software, VoIP included, but security is only just one building block.

Here are a few examples on what privacy in VoIP might mean to you:

• People won’t be able to eavesdrop on your calls.
• People won’t be able to record and then play-back your calls to others.
• People won’t be able to issue calls on your behalf, impersonating as you.
• People won’t be able to know who you’re calling to.
• People won’t be able to know who is calling you.
• People won’t be able to know that ou are making calls or receiving calls in the first place.
• People won’t be able to use your physical phone without your authorization.
• People won’t be able to access information on past calls that you’ve made.

Adding more requirements, such as these, means complicating the system itself. So where would you draw the line?