Call Mining and Privacy

[Stalwart]

What the government claims not to be doing, recording your calls and mining them for intelligence, business is doing.

CallMiner sells software that does this to Customer Call Centers. What you say to the rep is recorded, after telling you it will be. Call mining is what is done after you hang up.

CallMiner: http://www.callminer.com/ "Turn hours of customer calls into business intelligence"

This gives some background on call mining:

http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=5297

"With the advent of call mining technologies, call centers need no longer ignore a single customer voice. Call mining technologies convert recorded calls into minable databases of text and data. When these are combined with industry-standard data mining and unstructured data analysis technologies, call centers now have a powerful tool to mine 100 percent of call content for business intelligence."

and:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/032805audio.html

"Call-mining technology combines speech recognition, speech analysis and data-mining capabilities to make it easy for companies to find specific information in audio archives and spot service gaps, sales opportunities and emerging customer trends."

"Government agencies, in particular, are turning to call mining and speech analytics to help pore through huge amounts of audio secured for homeland security initiatives, says Daniel Hong, voice business analyst at Datamonitor. "If they use call mining, they're able to do that quite a lot faster, at a fraction of the cost, and on an on-going basis," he says."

Callminer received CIA In-Q-Tel funding described by this PR release:
http://www.in-q-tel.com/news/releases/02_08_05.html

Recently Comcast bought CallMiner software:

http://www.callminer.com/news.html

"The US communications provider Comcast Corporation has appointed speech analytics software firm CallMiner to deploy its Virtual Server Room distributed processing platform to analyse every recorded call to Comcast's Midwest call centre."

Nexidia is a competitor of Callminer selling call mining software to business and government. http://www.nexidia.com/ A former head NSA is on the board.

There is no mention of anything that I have researched about any anonymizers to detach customer identity from what is recorded except a single hit in relation to a product by Nohold. Perhaps this is an independent responsibility of the company that buys it.

Business is recording and mining customer calls with no legal problems. Can the government also do that when anyone calls them? It is hard to know what the government is doing. Business however is wide open for research in this area. Business marketing of call mining are a rich source of info on exactly what it is and how it is used.

CallCenter is an online magazine for the industry and provide some interesting reading.
http://www.callcentermagazine.com/

Call mining companies have multiple links to NSA.

Still researching. Any assistance appreciated. Call mining conducted by business seems to have gotten little attention as a privacy issue. Certainly less than the government has gotten for what it is suspected of doing and business is actually doing.

When you consider that business information about a customer can be shared with "affiliated businesses" the conclusions are less than reassuring that privacy in communications is being respected and protected.