Protecting Your Privacy
As a customer of Smithville Telephone, the FCC has determined that you have a legal right to control certain proprietary information contained in your account. This information is called Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI). Under the law, we have a duty to protect this information. Smithville Telephone will not use or share this information unless you expressly give us your permission to do so.
What is CPNI?
According to the FCC it is:
Customer Proprietary Network Information
(A) Information that relates to the quantity, technical configuration, type, destination, and amount of use of a telecommunications service subscribed to by any customer of a telecommunications carrier, and that is made available to the carrier by the customer solely by the virtue of the carrier-customer relationship; and (B) information contained in the bills pertaining to telephone exchange service or telephone toll service received by a customer of a carrier; except that such term does not include subscriber list information.
Except as required by law or with the approval of the customer, a telecommunications carrier that receives or obtains customer proprietary network information by virtue of its provision of telecommunications service shall only use, disclose, or permit access to individually identifiable customer proprietary network information in its provision of (A) the telecommunications service from which such information is derived, or (B) services necessary to, or used in, the provision of such telecommunications services, including the publishing of directories.
In plain language, CPNI is information contained within your account records that may reveal who, when, where or how a customer uses their phone. It also includes any information on the customers bill revealing what services or toll service the customer currently uses.
This means we can use related information contained within your account to sell you services or calling features. For example, Smithville Telephone could look at the features you currently have to promote a feature such as Call Waiting, or if you are a Smithville Long Distance customer use your long distance calling habits to sell you a different Smithville Long Distance calling plan.
We cannot use information gathered from one Smithville division to sell products for another Smithville division. For example, we cannot look at toll records of non-Smithville Long Distance customers to sell a Smithville Long Distance calling plan.
More detailed information is available at www.fcc.gov.