No joke! Now you have the ability to buy someone else’s phone records. According to this article that appeared today in the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

I am not in law enforcement or a privacy expert; I know I have a problem with this. My phone calls are my own business, and they should not be available to others! At this point everyone is focusing on the possible threat to undercover law enforcement agents and how criminals could use this information to expose them in a potentially life threatening manner, and I understand that concern.

However, this also affects normal everyday people as well. With this information “employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist — or a competing company.” How long before it becomes a normal part of the hiring process? This could lead to an entirely new form of discrimination in the hiring process, with employers not hiring people because they have made contact with a competing company, or perhaps because they don’t like the trend of the person ordering to much take out food or something else.

“According to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use… this problem is all too common [and], federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime.”

This is one piece of legislation that I hope gets approved [depending on the wording and the full extent of what it covers].