The vast majority of people whose call records have been stolen by Chinese hackers have not been notified, according to industry sources, and there is no indication that most affected people will be notified in the near future.
The FBI, AT&T and Verizon — the two telecommunications companies the hacking campaign appears to have affected most severely — have for months alerted some victims whose phone calls were listened to or texts were read. Many of those people were high-value intelligence targets related to U.S. politics and government, an FBI official said in a media call last week. The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told NBC News in October that the FBI had informed them that they had been targeted.
The hackers accessed a different but still sensitive type of information for far more people, mostly in the Washington, D.C., area: more generalized information about phone calls and texts, called metadata. Phone companies maintain records like which phone numbers participated in calls and when those calls happened and potentially the locations of the cell towers their phones connected to.
[…]