All about call records

Hello!

Call records are the lifeblood of telecoms, and that includes us. Here’s how they came to be, what you’ll find inside and how you can get them:

Enjoy your weekend,

Nick :blush:

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Do you store incoming call/sms records and do you give them out?

Also any idea why other companies will only give incoming records with a court order?

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Yes to the call records, but we don’t see incoming SMS. We’ll have an update on that front soon.

I’ll get back to you on the second part. :slight_smile:

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Probably because they don’t have an automated process in place for it and want to minimise the amount of manual work they have to do, so they try and make it super difficult for you to actually get them. However thanks to GDPR I’m pretty sure you can request them with a Subject Access Request.

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They can charge you for the privilege of an SAR though to recoup costs of producing it

These companies are adamant that they won’t provide incoming records under GDPR.

Look at Three for example

I wonder what the ICO thinks of that. :smirk:

Incoming call records aren’t your personally identifiable data most likely, so I’d reckon the ICO doesn’t care

If outgoing are PII then there’s no reason why incoming shouldn’t be.

There must be some people who have taken it up the chain , but they still demand a court order.

Hopefully Nick can shed some light.

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Outgoing is who you’re calling

Incoming is who (that isn’t you) is calling you

I guess their argument is it isn’t your data, it’s theirs

I wonder what happens if you ask for the I incoming calls to be anonymised.

You could link up the records to your phone history, I suppose

There is legitimate interest on the recipient’s side to know who’s calling them, and in fact they already get that information through their call history on the phone (and the callers have a way to withhold their number if necessary).

Providing this information in a convenient form to the user doesn’t disclose any new information (they would’ve already had this info in their call history at the time the call was received) so this theory doesn’t hold up.

The carrier can’t presume that you have access to information that is considered personal to someone else.

It isn’t theirs to give, it’s the other persons. Even if you have it on your phone, why do you need it?

It holds up fine.