A report on The Sunday Times accuses EE and its partner Ipsos MORI of selling personal information to police. EE denies these accusations.
In a press release EE says, “Recent media articles suggesting that we sell the individual personal information of our customers to Ipsos MORI are simply not true.”
EE explains its “relationship with Ipsos MORI.” It says, “We work with Ipsos MORI on customer behaviour and network usage analysis. They are able to request from us a historical report from our database, which analyses the mobile network usage of large groups of customers. The report analyses how, when and where our network is being used by these large groups and what it is being collectively used for.
“Importantly this information is aggregated and anonymised before it gets shared with Ipsos MORI. By this we mean all the data supplied to Ipsos MORI from which reports are generated would never contain any information that identifies an individual customer. The data does not contain personal information, such as names, phones number, account addresses. The data we do provide is completely anonymised and aggregated into data sets of 50 or more in order to remove any individual references or identifiers.”
EE also explains how the information is used. It says, “The information generated helps to give useful insight into groups of people, to help improve understanding of crowd behaviours, internet trends at specific times etc. An example of this would be a report on what were the most popular websites visited during the Olympics to assist in the serving of more relevant offers for customers. Further examples include insight into traffic and road planning for retailers wanting to better understand the flow of visitors around a shopping centre and event organisers needing to plan better around the movement of crowds and traffic flow.
“We would never breach the trust our customers place in us and we act to comply fully with all relevant regulations.”
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