Telstra CEO David Thodey said the company is considering onselling customer data which would be able to track the movements of people including where they shop. Picture: Supplied. Source: News Limited

Chief executive David Thodey said the company, which has more than 16 million mobile customers, was contemplating sharing the shopping trends of its consenting client base, with other businesses for a fee.

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Telstra CEO David Thodey said data sharing was already successfully occurring globally, including the Singaporean shopping strip of Orchard Rd. Picture: News Corp Australia Source: News Corp Australia

Mr Thodey said the data, targeted at mainstream retailers, could include such things as Telstra’s customers key shopping times of the day and details of which shops they tend to visit.

“They can aggregate up that data and it’s not relating to me David Thodey, it’s aggregated data that says the peak times of the morning people are going into (shopping store) Zara,’’ Mr Thodey said.

“That data could be sold to someone for value because that’s really important information, it could be sold to other companies or businesses.’’

Telstra said data sharing was already successfully occurring globally, including the Singaporean shopping strip of Orchard Rd where wi-fi hot spots are used to aggregate customer information.

Mr Thodey, who on Thursday addressed an American Chamber of Commerce in Australia business briefing in Melbourne, stressed the information would not be a snapshot of a specific customer’s habits, but instead a larger group.

Telstra CEO David Thodey said for information to be sold to other companies Telstra would need to adopt open and transparent measures. Picture: Supplied. Source: News Limited

He said for this information to be sold to other companies Telstra would need to adopt open and transparent measures to ensure customers were aware this was happening and consenting.

“There could be instances where we look at that (information) but we would need to be very open with customers and say this is what we are doing,’’ Mr Thodey said.

Cyber Space, Law and Policy Community co-convener David Vaile said depending on how narrow the number of customers was being used in the data collection sets, it could be a dangerous move.

“They need to reveal their methodology, data sets, research capacity and their security testing mechanisms and open it up to be challenged,’’ he said.

“If it was completely aggregated out and at high-level bulk statistics then there’s really no privacy concern for that ... it depends on how it’s broken down.”