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Verizon and AT&T have promised to stop selling their mobile customers' location information to third-party data brokers following a security problem that leaked the real-time location of US cell phone users. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently urged all four major carriers to stop the practice, and today he published responses he received from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint. Wyden's statement praised Verizon for "taking quick action to protect its customers' privacy and security," but he criticized the other carriers for not making the same promise.
"After my investigation and follow-up reports revealed that middlemen are selling Americans' location to the highest bidder without their consent or making it available on insecure Web portals, Verizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies off," Wyden said. "In contrast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint seem content to continuing to sell their customers' private information to these shady middle men, Americans' privacy be damned."
AT&T changed its stance shortly after Wyden's statement. "Our top priority is to protect our customers' information, and, to that end, we will be ending our work with aggregators for these services as soon as practical in a way that preserves important, potential lifesaving services like emergency roadside assistance," AT&T said in a statement to Ars.
Sen. Wyden recognized AT&T's change on Twitter and called on T-Mobile and Sprint to follow suit.
[...] Sprint announced that it is changing their data sharing practices about two hours after the Ars story published. "Sprint is beginning the process of terminating its current contracts with data aggregators to whom we provide location data," Sprint told Ars. "This will take some time in order to unwind services to consumers, such as roadside assistance and fraud prevention services." Sprint said that it previously "suspended all data sharing" with LocationSmart, a data broker involved in the controversy. Sprint said that it stopped providing data to LocationSmart on May 25.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday June 21 2018, @10:17PM
Or, more likely, they'll start selling advertising services. That's how Facebook does it - they have tons of raw data that advertisers would kill for. But (Cambridge Analytica notwithstanding), rather than sell the data, they instead choose to USE the data by selling highly targeted advertisements.
Comedian Eugene Mirman explains how this works. [youtube.com]