U.S. phone company AT&T is changing its privacy policy, explaining to customers that it owns their phone records and can turn them over to law enforcement, after being criticized for complying with a controversial domestic surveillance program. The new policy takes effect on Friday and comes at a time when AT&T and several other U.S. phone companies face lawsuits for apparently agreeing to turn over the records of domestic phone calls to the National Security Agency. AT&T said the updated policy was aimed at helping customers understand its practices and does not change how it handles customer information. The new policy makes clear that the company believes it owns its customers data. It says that customer information constitutes “business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.” The earlier policy had simply said that, aside from normal business operations such as billing and service provisioning, the company could share customer information to “respond to subpoenas, court orders or other legal process, to the extent required and/or permitted by law.” Under the new policy, which was being mailed out to AT&T's more than 7 million Internet customers, the company also said that it would track viewing information for customers of a television service it is developing in order to help it make recommendations to customers based on their viewing habits. The company will also now require customers to agree to the policy before using its services. Spokesman Michael Coe said the company had been working on the new policy for the last six months. “We are not changing how we treat customer information,” said Coe. “We updated our policy to make the language clearer and easier for our customers to understand.”
