Everything you do on the web, from surfing websites to wasting your life on Facebook, downloading files to sending and reading emails, it all has to go through your broadband provider and they keep track of it all, whether you like it or not.
In most case this really doesn’t matter, and part of the price we pay for being able to use the Internet; but we also hope that at some point that data gets purge, or at the very least doesn’t get shared with anyone.
However that may not be true if this leaked document from the Department of Justice is any indication. Called “Retention Periods of Major Cellular Service Providers” (pdf) it is meant as a guide for law enforcement agencies who need to get their grimy mitts on our data. The data covers such areas as customer IP addresses, call logs, text messages, and browsing habits.
The document, marked for “Law Enforcement Use Only”, covers the data retention practices of the US telecom companies which include: AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile; and it seems they all have differences when it comes to retaining your data.
Where T-Mobile will keep a list of everyone you have exchanged text messages with for up to five years its competitor Sprint keeps them for five years. Verizon seems to be the best of them as they only keep the list, and the message contents, for a single year whereas AT&T will keep just the list for seven years.
The secret document was unearthed recently by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina via a FOIA request.
“People who are upset that Facebook is storing all their information should be really concerned that their cell phone is tracking them everywhere they’ve been,” said Catherine Crump, an ACLU staff attorney. “The government has this information because it wants to engage in surveillance.”
via Wired
This should actually come as no surprise to anyone and is probably the tip of the iceberg.
