AT&T to customers: All your data are belong to us

Found on The Inquirer on Wednesday, 21 June 2006
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US telco AT&T has rewritten its privacy policy to allow it to hand over customer records to whoever it wants.

The re-write has come about after the telco got into trouble for handing over phone records of ordinary Americans to the US government.

Legal experts say that AT&T seems to have re-written its so widely to avoid consumer-protection lawsuits. The outfit is being sued by San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation for allegedly allowing the NSA to tap into the company's data network, providing warrantless access to customers' e-mails and Web browsing.

The move goes back on a comment made last month when AT&T said in a statement it had "a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy" and that "our customers expect, deserve and receive nothing less than our fullest commitment to their privacy."

In fact a line in the 2004 policy which said "that privacy is an important issue for our customers and members" has been deleted.

That's one way to handle your customers after totally violating their privacy. There's still the question if this new policy is legal; in some other areas of the world, personal privacy is protected by law, and a company can't simply hand all the information out to anybody, unless the customer allows this (with the exception of court orders and such).