Fahmi said there was a lot of “hue and cry” when the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission issued a directive in June requiring phone companies to hand over data on all mobile phone calls made from January to March.

MCMC’s request for such data was aimed at collecting data for the statistics department.

The policy, however, led to brickbats, including by the opposition and MCA, who raised concerns over privacy and data security.

Today, Fahmi pointed out that tech giant Google had been fined US$314 million for allegedly stealing data from the phones of 14 million Californians.

Earlier this month, a California court ordered Google to pay over US$314.6 million to Android smartphone users in the state after they filed a class-action lawsuit.

The jury agreed with claims that the search engine was liable for sending and receiving information from Android devices without users’ permission.

“And yet we made no noise about the kind of data that we give away practically free, every single day, to social media platforms, to search engines, to artificial intelligence, to large language models,” Fahmi said when officiating the International Connectivity Conference and Expo here.

In June, Fahmi assured the public that MCMC was not collecting any personal information from telecommunications companies. Nor will the shared data be provided in a form that contains any personally identifiable information.

Derek John Fernandez, an MCMC commissioner, previously told FMT the sharing of anonymised mobile phone data was neither new nor intrusive.

It also mirrors what global tech platforms already do every day, he said.

Fernandez also said the move is consistent with the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, and falls within international best practices on data use for infrastructure planning and national development.

“This goes on every day if you use Google (and) Facebook,” he was quoted as saying.