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(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the whoops dept

I remember, many years ago, dealing with the “crossed line” phenomenon. A friend had a phoneline that somehow got crossed with (we guessed) a neighbor’s line. We’d be talking on the phone, and suddenly we’d hear – perfectly loud and clear – someone else start a conversation. We once spent a while listening in on one of these conversations and testing whether or not they could hear us. There was no reaction, so we began mocking everything that was being said (we were kids, and that’s what kids do) – which turned out to be a mistake when we (and they) discovered they could hear us. Anyway, I had no idea anything like that still happened – and especially did not expect it to occur on a mobile phone network. However, in Australia, thousands of Telstra mobile phone customers discovered that talking on the phone became a giant party line – and you had no idea who might be listening. They’re still not entirely sure what happened, but people trying to answer calls on their mobile phone (correctly indicated by the caller ID) found themselves listening to entirely unrelated conversations. They also found they often had access to the voicemail boxes of others.