TeleSign

History

2023: Accused of collecting data and transferring it to the United States

On 23 June 2023, the European Digital Rights Organisation said Belgian telecoms company TeleSign was violating privacy laws by collecting and transmitting mobile phone data from half the world's population and using it to create personalised assessments of people's trustworthiness. Accusations have been made against the following companies:

• BICS is a telecommunications company that partners with more than 500 mobile operators in more than 200 countries;
• TeleSign is a company that uses AI for digital identification and interaction;
• Proximus is the parent company of BICS and TeleSign.

Telesign Mobile Data Flow Chart

BICS is a company connecting telephone providers around the world. When processing telephone client data, BICS receives detailed information (for example, the regularity of made calls, the duration of calls, prolonged inactivity, activity in the range or successful incoming traffic) about half of mobile phone users worldwide.

TeleSign generates reputation points based on BICS data. In March 2022, the Belgian newspaper "Le Soir" first reported that the American company was receiving this data from BICS and compiling profiles of millions of phone users around the world. TeleSign gave each mobile phone user a trust score of 0 to 300 points. Based on this assessment, TeleSign customers (for example, TikTok, Salesforce and Microsoft) could decide whether to allow users to register on the platform or, for example, first require SMS verification. TeleSign verifies more than five billion unique phone numbers per month, half of all mobile users in the world.

According to Bloomberg, a copy of the user's data shows the extent of TeleSign surveillance. Wanting to know what was done with their data, several mobile users exercised their right under GDPR to obtain a copy of their data from TeleSign, BICS and the national mobile operator. The answers turned out to be very unexpected: none of the mobile operators listed TeleSign as the recipient and did not know that user data was sent to TeleSign. At the same time, TeleSign confirmed it had a phone number and reported a trust score assigned to their number, such as medium-low.

On its website, TeleSign claims to use AI models to analyze the vast amount of data received from BICS and to create a trust score for each phone number. All this is happening in the United States, where the American authorities can also access TeleSign personal data.^[1]

Notes