House bill seeks to protect consumers' phone records

A LAWMAKER is strongly pushing for the early passage of a measure declaring as criminal act the unauthorized access of consumers' phone records.

Camarines Sur Representative Diosdado "Dato" Arroyo (2nd district, Camarines Sur) filed House Bill 6130 to be known as the "Protecting Consumers' Phone Records Act" to further reinforce a person's right to privacy in communications.

The measures seeks to amend Republic Act 4200 or "An Act to Prohibit and Penalize Wire Tapping and other related violations of the Privacy of Communication, and for other Purposes," by providing penalties to make difficult the access of consumers' phone records without their proper authorization.

Violators will be penalized with a P20,000 fine for each violation or each day of continuing violation except that the amount assessed for any continuing violation shall not exceed P20,000,000.

Arroyo said cited Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which states that a person has the right to privacy and any unlawful intrusion to a person’s home and personal effects is a violation of this right. This also includes any person’s communication or correspondence, be it verbal or written.

"Due to innovations in information technology, this right to privacy has now been extended in scope to include even electronic ways of communicating," he noted.

Under the measure now pending before the House committee on trade and industry, it is prohibited for any person to acquire or use the customer proprietary network information and phone records information of another person without the persons' affirmative written consent.

The bill also prohibits any person to misrepresent that another person has consented to the acquisition or use of phone records information.

Likewise, obtaining unauthorized access to the data processing system or records of a telecommunications carrier or an IP-enabled voice service provider in order to acquire the customer proprietary network information and phone records information of one or more other persons is prohibited under the Act. (Kathrina Alvarez/Sunnex)