ATT could be using Snowflake for internal analytics
"Alternate credit scoring, hyper-targeted marketing and more... an emerging trend of companies building partnerships with telecoms to power use cases across multiple industries." was the blurb for the unit Snowflake specially set up for Telco data in early 2023 touting "location data", but this product is not aimed at the telco's use-case; coincidentally this was also around the time Snowflake was touting integration with GenAI.
(It's not "competitor analysis" either, because if it was they would have obscured the 68m former phone numbers to prevent abuse by direct-marketing.)
[0]: "Unlocking the Value of Telecom Data: Why It’s Time to Act" https://www.snowflake.com/blog/telecom-data-partnerships/
That pretty much says it.
It's disappointing that TechCrunch didn't point this out. Nor did the New York Times.[1] Yet it's right there on Snowflake's site.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/business/att-data-breach....
- Yes about Snowflake's cloud telco unit explicitly marketing the fact that telco data contains location. See my updated post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40949640
It's possible they were operating from a privacy first principle and storing only the exact data they needed for a specific internal objective.
As to who would be the end-user for the social graph of 110m users with location data but without dates and times, show us any use-case that's telco-related (not even spam prevention). It's not going to be. You'd want timestamps to disambiguate who are they contacting at work, at home, on their commute, at weekends, etc. So without that it'll be more like alternate credit scoring, surveillance, national-security. And why was Snowflake so eager to promote industries building business models on users' location data? For growth, sure, but who is this mystery industry sector that suddenly sprang up at the same time as GPT-4?
> [Eric Scott] AT&T was using the data to build a social graph. They didn't record the date and time because they didn't need it.
That isn't "internal analytics". The end-customers who would be buying that aren't telcos. Like I said.
e.g. a startup doing an Alternate credit scoring model isn't "internal analytics" wrt a telco.
Service A can access the dataset with the location hidden while Service B can access the dataset with the timestamp hidden while Service C can access the full dataset.
So Snowflake probably has the full dataset, and the account that was used in the breach only had access to a part of it, where the timestamp was hidden.
It's hard to come to any conclusion about what was done with the data on this account.
We can even go as far as saying that the account never used the data but had access to it because it was part of a group of accounts with access to it.