Malaysian govt demands telcos hand over detailed phone records, internet usage data — report

KUALA LUMPUR (June 6): The Malaysian government has ordered the country’s telecommunications firms to hand over detailed records of phone calls and internet usage, South China Morning Post reported on Friday.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) demanded detailed call and internet logs for the first three months of this year, apparently for the government’s "Mobile Phone Data" project, the news site reported, citing two unidentified industry people.

Non-compliance would be considered an offence under the Communications and Multimedia Act, which carries a penalty of a RM20,000 fine or six months' jail, according to the news site, which noted that it had seen the letter sent to telcos in April.

“They are asking for call records, IP call records, location, latitude and longitude,” one of the persons was quoted as saying. “We have asked MCMC about transparency and accountability for the use of the data. We don’t know if MCMC will make a public statement that such an exercise is under way.”

IYKYK......

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Seems, the telcos have converted the MSISDN (Malaysian) 12-digit mobile and fixed phone no. into a unique 8-digit code  by using their own  conversion formula, before submission to the MCMC.
....... Does MCMC also has this conversion formula, eg to de-anonymize the above sample MSISDN 8-digit code into an identifiable mobile/fixed phone no. .?

Mobile phone no., eg U Mobile = +6018XXXXXXX
Fixed phone no., eg TM Unifi Home = +603XXXXXXXX
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Outrageous.

This is data that any half-competent data person can reverse engineer.

If any policymaker doesn't believe me, call me into a room and give me a sample of the data. I'll find your unique ID within 10 mins.

BTW, worth saying, I don't think this is any nefarious plan from Minister or Deputy, or even DOSM who is asking for statistical purposes. It's much more behind the scenes.

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Fyi, .......

https://www.lowyat.net/2025/355143/telcos-r...data-statement/ - Telcos Respond To MCMC’s Statement On Mobile Phone Data Collection
The companies affirm that they are fully committed to safeguarding customer privacy.
BY HEIRUL KAMEL JUNE 8, 2025 
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https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/758340 - Cabinet approved mobile data collection in 2023; no opt-out for Malaysians — MCMC
= how come this was not reported in the news in 2023.? This was only reported by SCMP, a China/HK news media, a few days ago.
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Alright, let me try to give two examples of how the Mobile Phone Call (MPC) dataset can be abused:
1 - Tracking protestors/activists
2 - Profiling voters
🧵

1) There's a protest held at Dataran Merdeka and the cops are trying to arrest or detain anyone who was involved. They managed to get a hold of one of the protestor's phone with full access to their phone calls, Whatsapp calls and even Zoom meetings.

So, with the MPC, where you don't have the person's name or phone number, you can cross reference the calls from the confiscated phone (which has the names and numbers) with the the corresponding calls in the MPC based on the time of the call.

These would likely be fellow protestors/activists. Once you have that info, you can then check through the entire MPC to see their location history which could also identify potential meeting areas (if other protestors are also present).

Geographical tracking in the MPC is not exact, but it can be enough to narrow the search to specific areas, so if they cross reference CSO centres, address of person's of interest and they can potentially find hideouts and whatnot.

2) This one is more nefarious and oblique. Using the MPC data as a whole, they can begin to map out call patterns, travel histories and social connections. You can potentially identify local or migrant voters just by looking at their call patterns and locations.

Frequency of calls to specific numbers over specific times can also reveal details about the kind of work this person is doing. Office jobs would mean their calls would be located at specific spots during 9-5 but gig or freelance workers would have it more sporadically.

It can also be used to generate family and friends networks to see how interconnected they are over a geographic space. It can identify groups of people who have friends who are local, spread out over the country or overseas.

Individually, all of these networks aren't that useful, but when aggregated, they can be used to create "shadow dossiers" that represent various demographics of voters. These dossiers do not represent specific individuals, but rather groups of people with shared characteristics.

These are huge networks with millions of data points, so the patterns that emerge are quite accurate. Not all of it works of course, but given enough time for analysis (and also testing), it can be very effective to predict voter tendencies based on demographic profiles

So, political parties can combine these shadow dossiers with data from other sources such as voter registries, polling data, and census data. The government of course has the most power to leverage this.

Thus, if a government wants to collect ANY kind of population behaviour data, they MUST justify why it is needed and with good reason. WE MUST NOT give away this data to the elites in power who will then have the power to manipulate us without our knowledge.