EE has hit back at claims by the Sunday Times that it and market research firm Ipsos MORI have been working on a deal that would feed data on EE's 27 million customers to the research firm, and even, allegedly, to the police.
An EE spokesperson told Computing the allegations are "misleading to say the least", but admitted that information is being shared.
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"The information is anonymised and aggregrated, and cannot be used to identify the personal information of individual customers," said EE's spokesperson.
"We would never breach the trust our customers place in us and we always act to comply fully with the Data Protection Act."
EE told Computing the situation had arisen due to "confusion" around one particular slide shown during a presentation meeting with Ipsos MORI.
"One of the slides showed information EE has about these customers, and then another slide shows all the information that Ipsos is provided by EE; aggregated data of 50 people or more - anonymous data," said the spokesperson.
"Now, this is where the confusion comes - because they showed a slide which showed the data we hold, and we're a mobile phone company; of course we've got our customers' personal information."
The spokesperson maintained that any information the slide may have alluded to was not shared on an individual customer basis.
But EE could not account for the apparent presence of police at meetings about data sharing, or how, if both Ipso MORI and police representatives understood the terms of the agreement, the story became public.
"That's a very good question," EE's spokesperson said. "I can't comment on what the police were going to do, or say, because we've held no conversations with the police."
Computing asked EE if this meant police had met with Ipso MORI purely to discuss the sharing of data from aggregated groups of 50 or more anonymous users, and EE confirmed that "that could be the only possible thing they could get from Ipsos".
EE's spokesperson said that EE "[works] with Ipsos Mori [to] carry out market research, like many other internet and telecommunication companies, to determine trending and better understand customer behaviour. Most importantly, any data analysis is entirely aggregated and anonymised and it is simply not possible to extract any personal information from this."
Danvers Baillieu, COO of security firm HideMyAss.com, commented on the allegations, saying:
"Affected customers of EE will rightly be shocked that their privacy has already been compromised by EE with its deal with Ipsos MORI, but all of their customers should be appalled that EE and Ipsos MORI have further conspired with the Met Police to completely bypass the legal safeguards on private data snooping."
Computing would like to hear from any members of the Metropolitan police who can further shed light on details of discussions with either EE or Ipsos MORI on customer data sharing.
