Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. He is also Canada’s premier writer on the telecommunications industry.

Last month he wrote a provocative column called Why Canada’s Telecom Companies Should Come Clean About Customer Information

Here’s a brief excerpt:

I wrote a column arguing that Canada’s telecom companies should come clean about their disclosures of customer information. That column was in response to a public letter from leading civil liberties groups and academics sent to Canada’s leading telecom companies asking them to shed new light into their data retention and sharing policies…to address the lack of transparency regarding how and when Canadians’ personal information may be disclosed without their knowledge to law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

Concerns with telecom secrecy has become particularly pronounced in recent months as a steady stream of revelations that have painted a picture of ubiquitous surveillance that captures “all the signals all the time”, sweeping up billions of phone calls, texts, emails, and Internet activity with dragnet-style efficiency.

Canada’s role in the surveillance activities remains a bit of mystery, yet there is little doubt that Canadian telecom and Internet companies play an important part as intermediaries that access, retain, and possibly disclose information about their subscribers’ activities.

Good points there, and we agree. The telecommunications industry must become more transparent.

So, we’ll go first. Here’s what we here at Worldline disclose.

I asked our CTO Francisco Dominguez to spell out in the simplest terms what we do and don’t do when it comes to our customers data and information. It turns out, we don’t do much, and when we do disclose any information it’s under very specific circumstances with very strict guidelines:

According to Francisco, for telephone numbers, if a law enforcement agency (LEA) requests information and indicates it’s an imminent threat to life  we collect the law enforcement agency contact  details (badge/name/dept/LEA name/contact number) and confirm the LEA through a call back mechanism, then we provide address details for the subscriber limited to:

 First-name Last-name, address, city, postal code, alternate phone numbers

If a law enforcement agency requests information and does not indicate an imminent threat to life we require a warrant.

Once a warrant is received we provide the details outlined in the warrant only.

So, for the record, that’s our disclosure policy. Contact information only, and only when it’s a matter of life or death, or if we are presented with a warrant. As Michael wrote, “Canadian telecom and Internet companies play an important part as intermediaries that access, retain, and possibly disclose information about their subscribers’ activities.”

Very true, and we don’t play that game.