About a month back, T-Mobile, the mobile broadband provider, was in the news for all the wrong reasons, after it was revealed that a staff member had been leaking sensitive customer data to outside parties for hefty sums. Now, yet another aspect of the issue is unfolding, which reveals that T-Mobile’s knowledge of the leak goes back to about a year.

Huge protests followed the news of the data leak, with protestors demanding stringent action and higher penalties for those engaged in selling sensitive data to outsiders. This was called the biggest breach of privacy in history. A staff member, who has since been sacked, was selling information about customers like dates of contract expiry to brokers who, in turn, sold them to competing providers. These customers were then contacted by competitors with attractive plans and schemes to poach them away from T-Mobile.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched an investigation into the issue following intimation by T-Mobile about suspicious activity. It has now been revealed that the T-Mobile intimation of anomalies was actually made as early as in December 2008. This means that both the provider as well as the ICO had been aware of the data leak for about a year before the news finally made it to public view. However, no discernable action was taken by either during this period to curb the leak or to protect customers.

This inactivity of T-Mobile and the ICO has led to a fresh volley of protests against the two for failing to prevent obvious misuse of private information.

The fact of the delay was revealed after an enquiry to the ICO under the Freedom of Information Act, during which the ICO was asked when T-Mobile first gave intimation of suspicious activity.

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