A lawsuit has been filed with the Central District Court, with a request to turn it into a class action lawsuit, against Bezeq The Israeli Telecommunication Co. Ltd. (TASE: BEZQ) cellular subsidiary Pelephone Communications Ltd. The lawsuit accuses the company of wiretapping, in that it stores all SMS message sent and received over its network.
The lawsuit emphasizes that Pelephone not only stores "communications data", such as when messages are sent, the phone numbers of the sender and recipient, and length of the SMS, but that the company keeps the entire content of the messages. The claimant says that Pelephone is the only cellular operator to do this.
Claimants Adv. Koby Sudri and Ashraf Abu-Razak base their claim on Sudri's correspondence with Pelephone deputy legal counsel Adv. Ido Rosenberg. Rosenberg admits that the company copies and keeps the content of all SMS messages.
Rosenberg said that customers give "implied consent" to the saving of their SMS messages. He added that the messages are kept for one month, although the period varies from time to time and depends on the systems. He said that access to the database is restricted, and that the data is saved in order to provide the SMS services.
Sudri and Abu-Razak argue that Pelephone has no authorization to save SMS messages, and that it infringes on both the privacy of it subscribers and on the privacy of subscribers of other networks, by concealing the fact of the storage from them.
Sudri discovered Pelephone's practice when he was representing a client in a criminal case, and the content of an SMS, which Pelephone had retrieved long after the SMS was sent, was submitted as evidence to the court.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 29, 2009
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