Editorial: Cellphone Searches

The New York Times has an editorial in today’s paper that begins:

The Ohio Supreme Court has struck an important blow for privacy rights, ruling that the police need a warrant to search a cellphone. The court rightly recognized that cellphones today are a lot more than just telephones, that they hold a wealth of personal information and that the privacy interest in them is considerable. This was the first such ruling from a state supreme court. It is a model for other courts to follow.

Read more on the NY Times.

Cellphone data as witness

Mikhail Mallayev, who was convicted in March of murdering an orthodontist whose wife wanted him killed during a bitter custody battle, stayed off his cellphone the morning of the shooting in Queens. But afterward, he chatted away, unaware that his phone was acting like a tracking device and would disprove his alibi — that he was not in New York the day of the killing.

Darryl Littlejohn, a nightclub bouncer, made call after call on his cellphone as he drove from his home in Queens to a desolate Brooklyn street to dump the body of Imette St. Guillen, the graduate student he was convicted this month of murdering.

The pivotal role that cellphone records played in these two prominent New York murder trials this year highlights the surge in law enforcement’s use of increasingly sophisticated cellular tracking techniques to keep tabs on suspects before they are arrested and build criminal cases against them by mapping their past movements.

Read more in The New York Times.

Banks: All your cellphone are belong to us

I was grumbling at a privacy conference about my bank’s privacy policy and that it seemed impossible to get a bank to truly delete records and take back your data from affiliates if you no longer had an account. Why should we be contacted in perpetuity if we are no longer customers? In response to my grumbling, a well-known privacy expert shrugged dismissively and commented that all banks do that. He was correct, but that doesn’t make it right. And because most of us have been too complacent, banks in most states are now encroaching on our privacy even more. Have you seen your most updated bank policy?

This morning, I received an email from a regular reader of PogoWasRight.org, who is appalled at the way his bank changed their policies. Here’s the relevant text from the bank’s newly revised policy that went into effect on June 1:

CELLULAR PHONE CONTACT POLICY

By providing us with a telephone number for a cellular phone or other wireless device, you are expressly consenting to receiving communications – including but not limited to prerecorded or artifical voice message calls, text messages, and calls made by an automatic telephone dialing system – from us and our affiliates and agents at that number. This express consent applies to each such telephone number that you provide to us now or in the future and permits such calls regardless of their purpose. Calls and messages may incur access fees from your cellular provider.

That’s pretty egregious, isn’t it? And yet, if this type of thing is, indeed, industry-wide, where does it leave consumers who are not living in California, where customers do have some right to limit sharing of information?

I wonder what would happen if you told your bank that you changed your phone number and declined to give them the new number. Would they close your account? Or what if when you went to open your account, you had lots of lovely identification information but told them that you do not own a phone? Would they refuse to open an account for you?

And what if we do not give them our number directly but they obtain it through Caller ID? Can they then use that number to contact us and also give it to their affiliates? Do we need to use Caller ID blocking to prevent them from seeing our cellphone number if we should call them?

I don’t necessarily mind my bank being able to contact me if there’s some problem with my account, and there are times when I would actually appreciate a call. It’s these unwanted calls and calls from affiliates that need to be reined in. In today’s world, many people do not own landlines and cell phones are their only phones. To have a number that might be jealously guarded given out to “affiliates” and to have to agree to incur unwanted phone charges so that they can advertise is just…. violative of our privacy.

Who is looking out for our privacy? And do we need Congress to make the California Financial Information Privacy Act the basis for federal law?