Originally published February 26 2006
Websites sell personal cell phone records
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Several websites are now in the business of selling personal cell phone records to anyone who provides them with a cell phone number and around $100, prompting several lawsuits and questions about the legality of the practice.
Anyone -- a stalker, a jealous lover, a curious employer -- with merely your cell-phone number can visit one of several Web sites, pay around $100, and in a few hours find out whom you've been calling and who's been calling you.
"All we needed was General Clark's cell phone number and our credit card, and 24 hours later we had one hundred calls the general made on his cell phone in November," according to a posting on the site, which said it contacted Clark about its efforts to expose the dangers of the practice, which is in a legal gray area.
"If you have a legitimate need you can get these records, the problem is these companies are offering an illegal shortcut that is unfair to the consumer," said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy organization.
Third parties are supposed to go to court to get phone records and have to convince a judge that those records are important to a legal case.
On Friday, Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest cell-phone carrier, has received a temporary restraining order against 1st Source Information Specialists, a Florida firm that owns locatecell.com and several other Web sites that offer these records.
On the legislative front, House Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada on Friday called on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate how these companies are obtaining this information.
Charles Schumer (D-NY) plans to introduce legislation in the Senate tomorrow that would make it a felony to obtain customer information from a telephone-service provider by pretending to be someone else, a practice called "pretexting," widely believed to be a chief way these companies accessing the data.
Lawmakers and privacy experts say the practice appears to violate existing laws, but there are presently no federal laws that ban the practice specifically.
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