An activist who has already cost Facebook $1 billion is now going after Proximus: the service provider risks a fine of €236m | Technique

TeleSign gives each mobile phone owner a reliability score between 0 and 300 points. Based on this, the company’s clients, such as TikTok and Microsoft, can decide whether a user is allowed to create an account, needs to verify themselves more or is simply not allowed. done,” says attorney and activist Max Schrems.

“Anyone who pays a few euros to TeleSign can simply look up any number to see how reliable it is, so to speak. Those of your neighbours, for example. Or I can now type your own if I want to,” he tells us. For example, we already check my phone number for “reliability”, and I get a low risk score, as it turns out:

To give this score, TeleSign uses artificial intelligence that unlocks a wide variety of user data. He receives this data from BICS, which is also a Proximus company that acts as a kind of “crossroads” between all kinds of providers of communication services in the world. BICS is constantly being targeted by hackers and intelligence agencies precisely because it stores so much important information about phone calls. This way he knows who is contacting whom and for how long.

According to Sherms, regular users have no way of knowing that BICS is collecting this data and forwarding it to TeleSign: “Based on GDPR, many customers have (Regulations Governing the Management and Security of Personal Data, ed.) Ask the service provider what data it collects and where it goes. TeleSign isn’t mentioned anywhere in there,” it seems. “It seems the telecom providers themselves don’t even know that BICS and TeleSign are using this data in this way.”

TeleSign verifies about 5 billion unique phone numbers per month, according to the noyb, the Schrems organization. About half of the world’s population has a mobile phone. “The confidential use of the data of the majority of the world’s telephony customers is inconsistent with GDPR legislation,” Schrems says.

“It’s also the case that TeleSign only gives you a score. The company you’re asking for decides what to do with it. So if you get a bad score based on the data in TeleSign, it could be because the webshop has decided they don’t want to sell to you, eg example”.

TeleSign sends text messages to users and knows your number, so it’s very strange that they can’t, for example, provide a link showing how they got your data. So they don’t. We’re just getting started in this state and we think we’ll learn a lot about what happens to user data.”

Your mobile phone number is personal data and may not be processed in any way by a company without your permission. “We are talking about an algorithm that has potentially negative consequences for the data subject,” says Hermann Maes, a GDPR expert. “That is why, according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you should be able to request how your score is calculated and you should also be able to ask someone to manually recalculate your score.” But then, you as a user should know that TeleSign has your data of course

At Proximus, it appears that they were not officially aware of a complaint: “Proximus has not been informed through official channels of a complaint that has been filed against the company. We have to analyze the content and cannot comment further.”

If Schrems is right, the company risks a fine of 4% of turnover or 236 million euros, according to Schrems. Schrems’ complaint against Meta (Facebook) cost the company a €1.2 billion fine at the end of May.

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