Phone Industry To The Poor: “No Privacy For You!”

[Commentary] The wireless industry trade association, CTIA, has asked the Federal Communications Commission to declare that poor people applying for Lifeline have no enforceable privacy protections when they provide things like their social security number, home address, full name, date of birth, and anything else an identity thief would need to make your life miserable. Meanwhile, US Telecom Association, the trade association for landline carriers, has actually sued the FCC for the right to behave utterly irresponsibly with any information poor people turn over about themselves — including the right to sell that information to 3rd parties.

Not that the wireless carriers would ever want to do anything like that, of course! As CTIA, USTA, and all their members constantly assure us, protecting customer privacy is a number one priority. Unless, of course, we’re running some secret experiments on tracking without notifying customers that accidentally expose customer information to third parties. Oh, and it might take longer than promised to actually let you opt out once you discover it. And in our lawsuit against the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules, we explicitly cite our inability to use customer information for marketing, the inability to sell this information to third parties, and the requirement to protect this information generally as one of the biggest burdens of classifying broadband as Title II. But other than that, there is no reason to think that CTIA’s members or USTA’s members would fail to respect and protect your privacy. So how did the Lifeline Reform Order which most people assumed was all about expanding Lifeline to broadband became the vehicle for the phone industry to tell poor people they have no privacy protections when they apply for a federal aid program?