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T-Mobile quietly reported a sharp rise in police demands for cell tower data – TechCrunch
T-Mobile has reported a small decline in the number of government data requests it receives, according to its latest transparency report, quietly published this week.
The third-largest cell giant in the U.S. reported 459,989 requests during 2018, down by a little over 1% on the year earlier. That includes an overall drop in subpoenas, court orders and pen registers and trap and trace devices used to record the incoming and outgoing callers; however, the number of search warrants issued went up by 27% and wiretaps increased by almost 3%.
The company rejected 85,201 requests, an increase of 7% on the year prior.
[...] For 2018, the company received 70,224 demands for historical call data, up by more than 9% on the year earlier.
Historical cell site location data allows law enforcement to understand which cell towers carried a call, text message or data, and therefore a subscriber’s historical real-time location at any given particular time. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this data was protected and required a warrant before a company is forced to turn it over. The so-called “Carpenter” decision was expected to result in a fall in the number of requests made because the bar to obtaining the records is far higher.
[...] The cell giant also reported that the number of tower dumps went up from 4,855 requests in 2017 to 6,184 requests in 2018, an increase of 27%.
Tower dumps are particularly controversial because these include information for all subscribers whose calls, messages and data went through a cell tower at any given time. That can include the data of hundreds or thousands of innocent subscribers at any time.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:51PM (1 child)
Why does the headline say the opposite of the summary?
Wouldn't "T-Mobile Quietly Reported a Small Decline in Police Demands for Cell Tower Data" be more accurate and less clickbaity?
If this is true then I'm OK with it. Also, the decision DID result in a reduction of requests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:22PM
It's not okay that companies and governments are collecting all this data in the first place, even if the government has to get warrants to inspect it later. It's a violation of our rights and privacy for them to even collect and store it longer than absolutely necessary in the first place.