US senators want AT&T to explain why it stores massive amounts of call and text message records on a third-party analytics platform that bills itself as an "AI Data Cloud."
AT&T revealed last week that "customer data was illegally downloaded from our workspace on a third-party cloud platform," and that the breach "includes files containing AT&T records of calls and texts of nearly all of AT&T's cellular customers." The third-party platform is Snowflake, and AT&T is one of many Snowflake corporate customers that had data stolen. Ticketmaster is another notable company affected by the breach.
AT&T and Snowflake each got letters yesterday from US Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. The senators asked AT&T CEO John Stankey to answer a series of questions, including this one:
Why had AT&T retained months of detailed records of customer communication for an extended amount of time and why had AT&T uploaded that sensitive information onto a third party analytics platform? What is AT&T policy, including timelines, concerning retaining and using such information?
AT&T's disclosures to customers and to the Securities and Exchange Commission didn't explain how Snowflake is used by AT&T. Snowflake's website says the company's cloud platform provides opportunities for collaborating and sharing data:
Powering the AI Data Cloud is Snowflake's single platform. Its unique architecture connects businesses globally, at practically any scale to bring data and workloads together. Together with the Snowflake Marketplace which simplifies the sharing, collaborating, and monetizing of thousands of datasets, services, and entire data applications—this creates the active and growing AI Data Cloud.
AT&T a featured customer
There was already a public explanation for why AT&T uses Snowflake, but it's written in marketing speak and isn't likely to directly answer the senators' questions. Sometime before the hacks, Snowflake posted a glowing case study on how AT&T lowered costs and gained "faster insights" by switching from internal systems to Snowflake.