Ridiculous Claims of Respecting Your Privacy After Violating It

Does anyone else shake their head in irritated bewilderment when privacy is quoted as the reason you cannot be told how your privacy has been invaded? The most recent example of such ridiculous reasoning comes from mobile phone service providers who happily collect and store your data for law enforcement to tap, but refuse to tell you the details of how your location information was otherwise shared with the government or advertisers.

Pro Publica reported that four different people requested their own geo-location data from the four largest cell phone providers, but all four mobile carriers refused to release it because:

    Verizon: “Verizon Wireless will release a subscriber’s location information to law enforcement with that subscriber’s written consent. These requests must come to Verizon Wireless through law enforcement; so we would provide info on your account to law enforcement— with your consent— but not directly to you.”

    Sprint: “We do not normally release this information to customers for privacy reasons because call detail records contain all calls made or received, including calls where numbers are ‘blocked.’ Because of an FCC rule requiring that we not disclose ‘blocked’ numbers, we only release this information to a customer when we receive a valid legal demand for it.”

    AT&T: “Giving customers location data for their wireless phones is not a service we provide.”

    T-Mobile: “No comment.”