London,
12
May
2013
|
23:00
Europe/London

EE and personal information

 

Recent media articles suggesting that we sell the individual personal information of our customers to Ipsos MORI are simply not true.

Our relationship with Ipsos MORI
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.

How it's used
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.

Questions:

Do you sell personal data to Ipsos MORI?
No. EE does not sell any individual customer's personal data to Ipsos MORI.

Why do the media think Ipsos MORI tried to sell EE data to the Met Police?
EE had no knowledge of any meeting between Ipsos and the Met Police. We would like to make it absolutely clear that as we do not share our customers' individual personal data with any third party*, Ipsos could not have possibly sold this to the Police, as reporting has suggested.

(*The police can request such information of all mobile operators under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.)

Are the reports correct that you provide Ipsos MORI with mobile usage data in real time?
No.

What customer information does EE sell?
We provide data based on groups of 50 people or more. It may contain, aggregated information about gender mix, age groupings, web trend activity and location trends. In most cases, these will be large groups of more than 1,000 mobile users.

What benefit is there for your customers and EE itself?
This data can help to inform on the impact of decisions around UK infrastructure developments. It can examine large samples of network data over the period of one month, for example to forecast the impact of new road, rail and air infrastructure.

Enhanced mobile services are a further benefit. Companies can adapt their mobile strategy to better serve their customers: For example, EE network usage could show that many people are getting lost travelling to a football stadium (as searches on maps were very high in the area). This could lead to TFL providing better signage.

It could also show how in-store behaviour is evolving – for example (in this instance, in multiples of 1000s) are people using a store's catalogue app while browsing within a shopping area? This kind of information would help the store to improve app functionality to allow a customer to, for example, enter in a product number and find out which stores stock the correct size.

About EE

EE is the most advanced digital communications company in Britain, providing mobile and fixed-line services to more than 26 million customers. EE is the first company in the UK to provide superfast 4G mobile services alongside fixed-line fibre, and runs the Orange, T-Mobile and EE brands in the UK.

Its 4G service is on track to cover more than 70% of the population by the end of 2013 and 98% by the end of 2014. EE's mobile service currently provides coverage to 99% of the population with 2G and 98% of the population with 3G.

EE's fibre service is currently available to 50% of the UK population.

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