The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission has defended its directive requiring phone companies to hand over data on all mobile phone calls made from January to March.
The commission said no personal information would be accessed, processed, or disclosed by the commission. It said that the data requested was anonymised and contained no information that can be used to identify any person.
The telecommunications companies are given the option to either process the data within their own secure environment and submit the required anonymised and aggregated output to the MCMC; or for those without processing capabilities, submit the anonymised data to the commission for processing.
“In both cases, no individual subscriber can be identified through the data collected,” MCMC said in a statement this evening.
The statement came hours after the South China Morning Post, quoting industry sources, said that Putrajaya had ordered mobile phone companies to hand over detailed records of phone calls and internet usage as it broadens controls over online activity.
The Post’s sources said MCMC had sent a letter to telcos calling up detailed call and internet logs for the first three months of this year, as part of the government’s mobile phone data project. The data collected would be used strictly for generating official statistics to support “evidence-based policymaking”.
It sought such statistics such as the number of active mobile broadband subscriptions and penetration rates by state, district, mukim, local authority and parliamentary and state constituencies.
The data was also used for tourism-related purposes, such as generating indicators on visitor numbers and domestic travel trends, MCMC said.
“The use of mobile phone data as a new source of national statistics is a strategic direction set by the government to strengthen the quality and timeliness of statistical outputs for policy and planning purposes,” it added.
MCMC said this initiative follows international best practices, mirroring efforts in countries like Indonesia and Brazil, where anonymised telecommunication data is used to improve national statistics without compromising user privacy.
