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Accessing One's Own Metadata

Posted by Soulskill on from the freedom-of-my-own-bloody-information-request dept.

skegg writes: Frustrated journalist Ben Grubb has documented his attempts at gaining access to his own metadata from his carrier. "After more than a year of phone calls and emails and a private mediation session, it still hasn't released the information or answered my one key question satisfactorily: the government can access my Telstra metadata, so why can't I?" Later, he says, "Telstra's one and only valid argument to date has been that identifying who calls me would be in breach of that person's privacy if they called from an unlisted number. I've agreed and said that in providing me with my metadata they should remove unlisted numbers. They argue this would be too difficult to do, which I think is baloney."

5 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Baloney? by alex67500 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If it can't be retrieved and reworked easily, then it was badly stored and organised in the first place...

  2. Bull by gurps_npc · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Now, if they charged him a ridiculous fee for such gathering, that would be another thing.

    But their is no way they "can't figure it out"

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    1. Re:Bull by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why should they "figure it out"? They don't owe him this information, it wasn't in any contract he signed to provide it to him, so why should they have to?

    2. Re:Bull by sumdumass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because if they do not offer this metadata as a product at minimum accessible to the people involved, there is a strong case that it is private and the feds or any government organization accessing would absolutely require a warrant according to the constitution.

      This is actually about more that trying to see what the government is accessing.

  3. Re:Baloney? by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it can't be retrieved and reworked easily, then it was badly stored and organised in the first place...

    That's not the problem. They DON'T WANT to give people this data. Because once they do, everyone will demand it, and wives will be filing for divorces over it, spawning lawsuits... etc.

    Let's put this in perspective: for decades, Ma Bell here in the U.S. denied, even to government, that they had complete records of who called whom, and when for every telephone in the country. In fact this led to the whole thing in TV and movie dramas of "keep them on the line long enough to trace the call". Calls actually haven't needed to be "traced" since the 1960s, but nobody told the government. This led to some huge lawsuits, when an electronics technician accidentally stumbled onto a manual for the machines that were used to compile the phone records.

    How many murders, kidnaps, etc. were never solved because the government did not know this information existed?

    When asked why they never told anybody, phone company representatives said they didn't want customers to know they had the information to give them itemized bills.

    Never underestimate the nefariousness of large corporate execs.