Customer Proprietary Network Information: What it Means to You

My website has offered investigative tools for years to people in need of such information. The searches and lookups we offer have always been legal, however.

The United States Congress has enacted laws that affect other sites borderline-illegal offerings in recent years, thus making them fully illegal. The first law to come into play was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which prohibited pretexting in efforts to obtain another person's financial information.

Last year, another law was passed that was designed to stop anyone but you from looking at your telephone bill. It was a very popular subject in the news for quite some time: anyone with a small amount of money could purchase anyone else's calling details. The connotations of this ability of anyone to obtain another person's calling records, or "tolls" as they are often called, sparked outrage amongst privacy minded individuals.

The law to protect your calling records is called "Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act of 2006." The full text of either of the laws I've mentioned can be found at thomas.loc.gov.

Specifically, in the latter law, you can no longer obtain, buy or sell the following information about another person's telephone account:

Information about the "quantity, technical configuration, type, destination, location, or amount of use of a service offered by a covered entity, subscribed to by any customer of that covered entity, and kept by or on behalf of that covered entity solely by virtue of the relationship between that covered entity and the customer;"

This means it is ILLEGAL to obtain, buy or sell information about how often someone makes a phone call, how their account is set up, what kind of plan they have, what numbers they call, where the calls originate from (yes, some sites were selling GPS information obtained from phones!) or how often they use their phone.

Other stipulations of this bill are that no one can obtain information that "is made available to a covered entity by a customer solely by virtue of the relationship between that covered entity and the customer" -- in other words, information that only a customer and the telephone company should know. This can include any number of things, for example: did the customer need to pay a deposit to get telephone service established? Is the customer entitled to any discounts through his or her work or school?

And finally, information that "is contained in any bill, itemization, or account statement provided to a customer by or on behalf of a covered entity solely by virtue of the relationship between that covered entity and the customer." Again, this part of the law is designed to stop the sales of calling records with no questions whatsoever. It is thoroughly illegal to obtain information that is detailed on a phone bill - if that information is something only the customer and the phone company should know.

All of the above mentioned things that are no longer allowed to be obtained, bought or sold about another person are considered "Customer Proprietary Network Information" (CPNI.) The Federal Communications Commission is even invoking new mandates to begin in 2008 where the release of any CPNI to an unauthorized individual can incur enormous fines to telephone companies that release the information. This is great news for privacy!

What does that leave the investigation industry available to pursue? At Phone Search Central, we keep on top of laws that affect the industry, and are proud to proclaim that we have never offered any financial information on subjects, nor have we accessed/pretexted/bought/sold CPNI. What we can offer investigators, bail bondsmen, attorneys, and process servers are "Customer Name and Address." Fortunately, a customer's name and address are not considered CPNI, and therefore we are still legally allowed to act when inviduals believe they can hide behind their cellular telephone number. This freedom to obtain such information has located runaway/kidnapped children, parents that hide from paying their child support, and fugitives from the law, to name a few.

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