Threats to personal information continue to mount; the latest reported risk to our personal privacy comes from companies selling cell phone records of consumers. For a significant fee, one simply needs to provide a person’s name, address, and cell phone number and can receive a record of that person’s outgoing calls for the past month. Details on several specific (online) companies and their offerings are discussed further in this Washington Post article.

While this sort of service appears to be generally illegal, companies are skirting the cell phone companies’ efforts to stymy the trade of such information. One expert interviewed by the Washington Post says that “information security by carriers to protect customer records is practically nonexistent and is routinely defeated” - a claim that carriers deny, despite the prevalence of companies advertising these services on the internet.

This entry was posted by Paul Otto (pnotto@ncsu.edu) on Saturday, July 9th, 2005 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Note: Blog posts are the opinions of their authors and do not reflect the official opinion of the National Science Foundation or North Carolina State University.