Telecom management at T-Mobile has publicly admitted that employees illicitly provided customer information to third-party data brokers, which had been the subject of a complaint by the UK’s digital consumer watchdog agency.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) says that the T-Mobile employees sold customer records to a data brokerage firm, as yet unnamed. The records were then sold by that brokerage for "substantial sums," according to the Guardian newspaper’s account of the case.

While T-Mobile approached the ICO voluntarily, the company’s public statements indicate that it was "surprised" that it had been identified by the agency, saying that it had hoped to keep its involvement private for "legal reasons." The Guardian’s report says that the consumer data may have been provided to the perpetrators of a cold-calling scam.

T-Mobile’s reputation for data security has suffered greatly of late, due to highly publicized service outages for various segments of its network and the loss of customer data to theft or error – most notably the widespread Sidekick data loss scandal that broke earlier this fall.

This entry was posted by Mobility Management News Desk on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Managing Mobile Devices News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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