John Ribeiro reports:
Privacy groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to declare that even “anonymized” phone records have to be protected under a privacy rule that restricts carriers from sharing customers’ information without their consent.
The petition filed before the FCC comes in the wake of reports that U.S. carriers like Verizon and AT&T were sharing phone records in bulk with the U.S. government.
Read more on Computerworld.
And EPIC.org writes:
EPIC has joined a petition to the Federal Communications Commission, organized by Public Knowledge, that asks the FCC to rule that the sale of consumer phone records to the government is a violation of the federal Communications Act. Last month, EPIC urged the FCC to determine whether AT&T violated the Communications Act when it sold private consumer call detail information to the Drug Enforcement Administration and Central Intelligence Agency. And in June, following the initial Snowden disclosure, EPIC wrote to the FCC to explain that Verizon had likely violated the Communications Act when it disclosed telephone records to the NSA. EPIC has also long supported the FCC’s consumer privacy enforcement authority, filing amicus briefs in significant cases, including US West v. FCC and NCTA v. FCC, to defend the agency’s privacy regulations. For more information, see EPIC: CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information), EPIC: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.