A US federal judge sided with AT&T by issuing a temporary restraining order against T-Mobile US to prohibit it from using a scraping tool to collect customers’ personal data to get them to switch.

The judge issued her finding yesterday (18 December) in a US federal court which stated T-Mobile’s Easy Switch programme “accessed AT&T’s protected computer systems without its authorisation”.

“T-Mobile’s unauthorised access allowed it to obtain over 100 fields of private customer data from AT&T’s servers for each affected customer and transmit that information back to T-Mobile’s servers in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act, the Comprehensive Computer DataAccess and Fraud Act, and the Georgia Computer Systems Protection Act.”

The judge noted “AT&T has and will incur immediate, irreparable harm if a temporary restraining order is not issued”.

T-Mobile deployed a beta version of Easy Switch at the Formula 1 Heineken Las Vegas Grand Prix on 20 November.

Easy Switch is an AI tool which analyses current AT&T or Verizon accounts before recommending optimal T-Mobile plans.

AT&T sought a temporary restraining order to prevent T-Mobile from using the price comparison tool to access password-protected software without its permission. It implemented security measures to block the first version of Easy Access on 24 November.

After AT&T’s countermeasures, T-Mobile disabled the original Easy Switch on 26 November and replaced it with the current version.

On 5 December, T-Mobile’s counsel told AT&T it “does not intend to revert to the original version of Easy Switch”.

T-Mobile argues AT&T’s lawsuit is moot since it no longer uses the version of Easy Switch which scrapes customer data.

“The threat of harm remains despite T-Mobile’s deactivation of Easy Switch because, as T-Mobile represented on the record, it is T-Mobile’s intent to retain the ability to ‘use something very similar [to the Easy Switch tool] that does the same thing but might be tweaked a little bit differently in the future,’” the ruling stated.

The temporary restraining order will expire at the end of 28 days after it was issued unless AT&T and T-Mobile come to an agreement or by a court order.