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"The data is used to make calls to 911 operators

May 14, 2017 by Lena Webb

"The data is used to make calls to 911 operators in the U.S., where it's collected for a fee," said Michael Rupp, senior policy officer for the Privacy and Security Project at Public Citizen. "This is in its early stages of development, but we're definitely confident it will be implemented by the end of this year."

The first step in the FCC's proposed rulemaking is to set a threshold requirement for how much information needs to be collected. That threshold is set by the Privacy and Security Project, which tracks data collected by phone companies.

"As our privacy is as important as data privacy, we need to take steps to ensure that any information being collected for this purpose does not fall within a certain threshold," Rupp explained. "This threshold is the way forward for us and other agencies. We want to ensure that any information collected is not collected in ways that would affect our safety and privacy."

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have been the targets of law enforcement for several years now, but there are some notable exceptions. In December 2015, a federal law called the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) required telecommunications companies to provide "clear, detailed, and accurate" information about the types of activities that they track and record. In that case, AT&T was able to obtain the information and access to the data as part of its "Privacy Shield" program that was set to expire in June 2016, but was renewed in March 2016 to apply to the Verizon Wireless program.

The EFF's Rupp explained to Motherboard that these exemptions have been on the books for a long time, but the EFF has not seen any of the data that has been collected for the past three years. In addition, he said, only a small percentage of Verizon's customer data is ever used with AT&T, and that many of the records "have not been updated for more than a few hours."

"We've never seen this kind of data," Rupp said.