Verizon and AT&T will stop selling phone’s location to data brokers
June 19th 2018
ArsTechnica:
It was revealed last month that prison phone company Securus offers a service enabling law enforcement officers to locate most American cell phones within seconds. Securus' service relies on data from LocationSmart, a data aggregator. It was also reported that a LocationSmart bug could have allowed anyone to surreptitiously track the real-time whereabouts of cell phone users.
Basically, mobile carriers had deals with middlemen acting as data aggregators that then had deals with other companies. It sounds shady, but Verizon describes some apparently legitimate uses:
Verizon's response to Wyden said that it "contracts with two aggregators, LocationSmart and Zumigo, in our location aggregator program." The data sharing is supposed to be used for legitimate business purposes, such as a truck rental company "us[ing] the location data to provide better assistance to customers renting trucks who experience problems on the road," Verizon said. Credit card companies may also use the data to "approximate a user's proximity to their home address when applying for a credit card online to help conï¬rm their identity and reduce fraud."
