Verizon Wireless Opt-Out Plan For Customer Records

An anonymous reader writes to let us know that Verizon Wireless is planning to share its customers' calling records (called CPNI) with "our affiliates, agents and parent companies (including Vodafone) and their subsidiaries." The article explains that CPNI "includes the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and time spent on each call, among other data." Some subscribers, it's not known if it's all of them, received a letter in the mail giving them 30 days to opt out of this sharing by calling 1-800-333-9956. Skydeck, a mobile and wireless services company, seems to have been the first to call attention to the Verizon initiative on their blog; they also posted a scan of the letter (sideways PDF) from Verizon.

Comments

Re:Time to switch

[mi]

The government breaking the law and private citizens breaking the law are radically different things.

We started with phone companies helping the government to break the law. It is not at all clear, the agreeing executives even knew (or should've known), that the government was overstepping the Constitutional limits. In fact, I don't think, it is a fully legally-answered question even today...

Yet the original poster implied, it is better to stay with Verizon Wireless, than to switch to a company, which has merely helped its government intercept phone conversations with (strongly) suspected foreign terrorists.

Re:Time to switch

[mi]

[...] by building contact lists of who calls who. This is precisely what they want to do in the name of fighting terror, but they get the same lists of people in various political parties, with ties to groups that expose various embarassing things about political leaders, have viewpoints that differ from their own or those in power

They could abuse that, indeed, if they were monitoring the calls within the US — something that is, indeed, illegal, and that is not even being alleged to has happened.

Monitoring calls where only one of the parties is in the US might be illegal too, but is far harder to abuse because most of the political life of USA happens inside the country. I mean, they could have found some calls between Clintons and Chinese Army or Kerry and Chinese Army, but that's about it...

has. And I can guarantee you that an administration that implemented NSA spying - AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION OF THE USA - 7 months BEFORE 9/11 - would be more than happy to misuse that information.

This sort of accusations needs links to respectable sources. 7 month before 9/11 (February 11, 2001), this administration was in its first month of governing (the President having just delivered the first "State of the Union" address; the kitchen staff still washing the dishes from the inaugural banquet) and merely preparing for the fight on tax cuts and the "No Child Left Behind" legislation projects. To imply, they have already implemented a new spying program as well is to give their efficiency way too much credit...

I think, the blogger, whom you copy-pasted here, got confused and confused you...

They have done more that is contrary to the Constitution and have by many Constitutional scholar's violated more than any other administration in history.

Worse even than Nixon's?.. Wow...