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Inside Comcast's Surveillance Policies

Posted by kdawson on from the cost-you-a-pretty-penny dept.

Monk writes "The Federation of American Scientists has obtained a recently disclosed Comcast Handbook for Law Enforcement which details its policies for divulging its customers' personal information. (Here's the handbook itself in PDF form.) All of Comcast's policies seem to follow the letter of the law, and seem to weigh customer privacy with law enforcement's requests. This is in apparent contrast to AT&T and a number of other telecommunication companies, which have been only too happy to give over subscriber records. According to the handbook, Comcast keeps logs for up to 180 days on IP address allocation, and they do not keep all of your e-mails forever (45 days at most). VoIP phone records are stored for 2 years, and cable records can only be retrieved upon a court order. The document even details how much it costs law enforcement to get access to personal data (data for child exploitation cases is free of charge)."

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. How much it costs? by aeschenkarnos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's odd. I'd have thought it cost "do it or be fined/arrested".

  2. Misleading article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Complying with requests from "Law Enforcement" is quite a bit different from complying with requests to assist a US government agency with an anti-terror program. Local law enforcement is far removed from the latter.

    Is this an attempt to improve Comcat's poor reputation among /.'ers? They still haven't changed thier undocumented policies related to bandwidth limitations on "unlimited bandwidth" accounts.