Cell Phone Records for Sale

tabdelgawad writes "The Washington Post has a good writeup on how 'data brokers' use various techniques to obtain cell phone records of individuals then offer them for sale to anyone who will pay. The data is obtained by either bribing phone company employees, or 'pretexting', or accessing unregistered customer accounts online. Although phone companies are the only source of this information (unlike, say SSNs which are available from many sources), one Cingular spokesman was quoted as saying that this is 'an infinitesimally small problem'."

Comments

net 10

[Lehk228]

i signed up with net 10 and i never even gave them my name, just pick up the phone at walmart, go online or call from a payphone to actiuvate it. wait 30 minutes to 1 day (varies) and it's active. i can buy refill cards with cash and activate them by phone or internet, all without giving out so much as my name. though it's a bit more expensive than standard cell plans at .10/min and .03/outgoin SMS they give me free incoming sms (Verizon are whores, they give everyone free outgoing sms and charge for incoming sms so you cann't control your spending)

Net 10 runs on the tracphone/cingular GSM network and has a nice quick voicemail system (verison i swear took me over 30 seconds to even start hearing voicemail)

no affiliation just a happy customer
verizon sucks

Re:net 10

[jcr]

Disposable mobile phones that aren't attached to anyone's personal information sound like they'd be superb for terrorists.

Yeah, so are air, public roads, and sunshine. What's your point?

-jcr

"This is an infintesimally small problem"

[Space cowboy]

Yes, for them, it is. Let's make it not so.

It's about time that companies were brought to book for being criminally stupid (not used in the legal sense, although I'd guess it's a grey area...)

Simon.

I've been wondering about this for some time

[suitepotato]

In certain circles, it is far from unknown that with a little grease to the palm and massage of the ego that you can get the weakest link in IT security, the human personnel, to compromise security and integrity of databases. It's been done for many years. Should it really surprise us that it happens with cell companies full of people who figure themselves underpaid for the work they do and having no real loyalties?

People who purposely reveal any customer personal account information should be punished for it, and given what incentives they need to testify against those who put them to it, and those who did made examples of. We know it's been done for years in IT, we certainly don't need it to spread in the cell world. A solid shout of intolerance for this from the public is needed.

Typically, this means that some politicians will make much, do little on topic, and load it with pork and rights abuses. So I'm not holding my breath.

At the telecom place I work, even without strict rules in place, I have always practiced a challenge based system to get information that the real customer should know about their company account off the top of their head. Until we have two-part authentication, it's the best I can do. Too bad so many others see no problem in farking over other people.

Here's a curious thing you can do with this

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

You can do the equivalent of google page ranking for people. People who make many calls or are frequently called are well connected nodes in the graph of all phonecalls. These are likely to be influential people. So if you're trying to market something, say, then these are the people to call.

Wake Up Call

[Doc Ruby]

VoIP allows anonymizer services that delete the records of the middleware proxy upon call completion, before they can be read by anyone. Callers still have to trust that the anonymizer will delete the records. But callers can also put another proxy at their endpoint, connecting to yet another endpoint somewhere else. And end-to-end public-key encryption is also available.

Will this "infinitesimal problem" explode into distrust of telcos, destroying their brands' tremendous value in "privacy"? That would really drive a lot of people into VoIP.

Re:Typical corporate attitude

[fermion]

We don't trust companies to regulate themselves. That is why conservatives want to kill all the lawyers. They are the only ones that will protect us from the usurpers of power, Dick and Cade. The lawyers and compentent judges have done too well a job ensuring the rights of the American People.