| Home : December 12 2013 Computer News : Privacy groups ask FCC to rule that carriers cannot share phone records |
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Privacy groups ask FCC to rule that carriers cannot share phone records |
December 12, 2013
Privacy groups have asked the U.S. FCC to declare that even “anonymized” phone records have to be protected under a privacy rule that restricts carriers from sharing customers’ information without their consent.The petition filed before the Federal Communications Commission comes in the wake of reports that U.S. carriers like Verizon and AT&T were sharing phone records in bulk with the U.S. government.The groups cite research to state that even so-called anonymized call records have sufficient information to link back to specific individuals. “When a carrier purges individual identities from a set of call records but leaves individual characteristics (such as incoming and outgoing calls, call times, and call durations) intact, the records are not anonymous at all; they are pseudonymous,” according to their petition filed Wednesday before the FCC.Section 222 of the Communications Act instructs carriers that, with few exceptions, they have to get customers’ consent before they can share “customer proprietary network information,” also referred to as CPNI, wrote Laura Moy, staff attorney at Public Knowledge, one of the groups filing the petition, in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2079661/privacy-groups-ask-fcc-to-rule-that-carriers-cannot-share-phone-records.html#tk.rss_all
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