T-Mobile refuses to accept a subscriber full access to the information about him is collected. According to the company, that costs too much work. The personal data protection Act gives customers the right to collected data.
Because T-Mobile is a telecommunications services provider, has a large amount of data about subscribers for a half year saving. Telco’s and isp’s fall under the retention obligation, that is intended to crime and terrorism. They, for example, must keep track of with whom someone has called and when an internet connection is made. Also, from the data to infer where someone is at any given moment was.
T-Mobile-subscriber Floor Terra asked all of the data about itself on at the telco, where he relied on an article in the personal data protection Act, which enables citizens the personal data that companies and organisations collect about them. “I was curious what information they have about me. I also want people to be aware what information about them is collected,” said Terra opposite Tweakers.net.
T-Mobile refused, however, all the data transfer, writes Terra on his blog. The company gave him instead a paper record of 42 pages, that only contains the data that T-Mobile in a period of ten days collected concerning him or her. According to the company, it is too much trouble for all the data to transfer; it would have to be 1500 pages of information. T-Mobile argues that all that data would need to check, because the the privacy of others may violate them, and found the importance of Terra is not heavy enough to bother to justify.
Ict-lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet says that that is no reason for the data not to transfer. “Case law has shown that customers have the right to their data, even if a company is a lot of effort and money,” says Engelfriet. “Moreover, they may not be more than five euro administration questions.” Engelfriet also wonders what data of Terra the privacy of others can harm.
It is according to the lawyer, not to T-Mobile to determine if someone has an interest in the querying of the data. “You have the right to have incorrect data about you to correct it,” he says. “And how can you know that data is not correct, if you can’t see?” However, there must be ‘reasonable intervals’ between the requests; a citizen cannot at the same company for weekly data. Terra does not rule out a lawsuit to have data still to get.
“I wanted the data also prefer to in an electronic format, but that did T-Mobile do not”, said Terra. The subscriber wanted the data to use to display them, such as the German politician Malte Spitz did with his location information. The German T-Mobile gave Spitz his full dossier. According to Engelfriet is T-Mobile, however, not obliged to keep the data in a certain way. “They may do so in the way that seems the best, as long as it is understandable”, according to Engelfriet. Remarkably, however, T-Mobile mentions sustainability as one of its ‘core values’ and the company uses for its shopping even a ‘paperless office’policy.
Both the spokesman as privacycommissaris of T-Mobile had ‘no need’ to opposite Tweakers.net to respond to the question. Previously showed that Facebook users are not all information about them, wanted to hand over, because a part of the data is ‘trade secret’ would be.