Who's been reading my cell-phone records?

26.11.2008

The legality of viewing cell-phone records isn't always as cut and dried as relying on a subpoena, warrant or customer permission, privacy experts said.

Improperly viewing phone records, whether for landline or mobile phones, should fall under federal wiretapping laws, Berkeley's Hoofnagle said. But the statutes specifically addressing phone-record privacy are complicated and aren't always as strong for cell phones as for landlines, he said. A recent bill in the California legislature aimed to protect cellular information as tightly as landline phone bills.

"California tried to strengthen its phone records protections, and there was a very strong lobbying effort from the phone companies to prevent expansion," Hoofnagle said.

The federal government has cracked down on improper access to cell records with the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act. It was enacted last year in part to prevent "pretexting," where unauthorized people call a carrier and pretend to make a legitimate request for information. Following the Obama records incident, Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, earlier this week the Department of Justice whether that law had been effective in protecting consumers' privacy. But whether the pretexting law covers this kind of internal breach will be a matter of interpretation, CDT's Schwartz said.

There isn't much a consumer can do to prevent phone-company employees delving into bill records, but Schwartz recommends that anyone concerned about it ask carriers about their privacy policies before signing up.