T-Mobile at centre of illegal data sale investigation

Employees at T-Mobile’s UK operation have been identified as the culprits in the illegal sale of subscriber data affecting “many thousands of customers”.

UK privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched a criminal investigation after a mobile telephone company – since revealed to be Deutsche Telekom owned T-Mobile – discovered that some its employees allegedly sold details relating to customers’ mobile phone contracts, including their expiry dates.

The information was allegedly sold on to T-Mobile’s competitors – which might be rival operators Vodafone, O2, Orange, or 3, or any number of third party brokers which were using the material to cold call customers prior to contract expiry dates to offer them an alternative contract – but at the moment the ICO is not saying how far its investigation will extend.

“The ICO has investigated and it appears that the information has been sold on to several brokers and that substantial amounts of money have changed hands. The ICO has obtained several search warrants and attended a number of premises, and is now preparing a prosecution file.”

According to our legal sources, this sort of thing is a legal grey area. If a company is buying this sort of data then it’s obliged to check that that the data was sourced legitimately.  But if the data passed through quite a few hands, like it may have in this case, an operator’s data controller could have asked the broker they bought the data from if it was legitimately sourced by way of covering itself.

But Information Commissioner Christopher Graham is using the incident as a platform to highlight the “existing paltry fines” for such offences and call for a greater deterrent in the form of a “custodial sentence” to better stop the unlawful trade in personal information.

Graham is backing the government’s proposal to introduce a custodial sentence for so called breaches of Section 55 of the Data Protection Act from April 1, 2010.

“We are considering the evidence with a view to prosecuting those responsible and I am keen to go much further and close down the entire unlawful industry in personal data. But, we will only be able to do this if blaggers and others who trade in personal data face the threat of a prison sentence,” Graham said.

“More and more personal information is being collected and held by government, public authorities and businesses. In the future, as new systems are developed and there is more and more interconnection of these systems, the risks of unlawful obtaining and disclosure become even greater. If public trust and confidence in the proper handling of personal information, whether by government or by others, is to be maintained effective sanctions are essential.

“A custodial sentence will also have the added benefit of making the section 55 offence a recordable one and open up the possibility of extradition in appropriate cases,” he said.

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Spinvox in a spin over privacy worries

UK-based speech to text specialist Spinvox has been caught up in controversy this week over its data protection standards, as well as questions about the company’s finances.

It has long been known that Spinvox uses people to transcribe messages under some circumstances; when the translating software fails to understand the message, for example. But recent claims by employees past and present go so far as to say that in fact the majority of messages are transcribed by call centre staff in Africa and Asia.

This has raised questions over data protection, and it now appears that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is breathing down Spinvox’s neck over the firm’s claim that it does not transfer any data outside of the European Economic Area.

Despite extensive funding, it is the burden of running these call centres that is understood to be putting a strain on the company’s finances, and it emerged last week that Spinvox staff had been asked to take share options in the firm instead of some or all of their paycheck for July and August. The firm is also known to be looking at other “cost cutting measures,” which many take to mean job cuts.

The BBC on Thursday reported that Spinvox has also been locked out of a London data centre over payment issues, which lends credence to the speculation that the firm is under financial pressure.

Rapid growth has been blamed for the company’s financial problems, and it should be noted that this same rapid growth was once a source of pride for the upstart firm. In June, the company signed a deal with Spanish carrier Telefónica that will see its text voicemail service made available to Telefónica’s entire Latin American customer base. The carrier has almost 125 million customers in the region.

Telecoms.com spoke to one of Spinvox’s partners, BestBefore Media, which uses the Spinvox API to do audio transcriptions as well as offer a service it describes as the “twitter of the spoken word,” known as AudioBoo.

Mark Rock, CEO of BestBefore said that his firm used Spinvox because they were impressed by the quality, but added that he was surprised to discover that people managed most of the transcription manually. “The line we were spun is that humans were only used where necessary,” he said.

Rock’s greatest concern also centres on privacy issues as his firm offers transcription services used by journalists which may involve sensitive information, leading him to “look into the data protection issues.” However, Rock noted that Spinvox is not mission critical and that there is “always somewhere else to go” if Spinvox were to run into trouble, financial or otherwise.