Your Telco Knows More About You Than Your Mother
Telcos know more about you than Facebook or Google. We should be much more worried about how they have been using or selling that information.
There is a company call Cignifi in the US that helps banks and credit rating agencies calculate credit scores for consumers using mobile phone usage data. This service is particularly useful in places like Brazil, where they work with telcos to score borrowers lacking financial history or banking records.
On their product page it says:
“Cignifi credit risk and fraud scores are derived using the most cutting edge machine learning algorithms utilizing dynamic behavioral data, including calling patterns, data transactions and internet usage.”
That last bit encapsulates everything you do on your smartphone: calls, transactions, surfing… details more intimate than most of us would allow any one person to know.
Is this practice of harvesting and commercializing your personal telco data limited to a few companies or countries?
Unfortunately no.
TDaaS
The industry has a name for it, Telecom data as a Service, or TDaaS.
Research and Markets produced a report in November 2017 that estimated the TDaaS market to be worth EUR…
