AT&T, Sprint, Verizon to Stop Sharing Customer Location Data With Third Parties
Summary: After KrebsOnSecurity reported that a LocationSmart opt-in demo allowed real-time location lookups of any mobile device without authentication, consent or authorization, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon said they would terminate location data sharing agreements with third-party aggregators. The chain ran from carriers to aggregators such as LocationSmart and Zumigo, then to firms like 3Cinteractive, and finally to Securus, which sold police departments the ability to look up the precise location of any cell phone across all major U.S. networks.
What's compelling: AT&T's own letter says Securus obtained location data without customer consent by treating law enforcement's representation of legal authority as a proxy for that consent, and AT&T described those requests as less than two tenths of one percent of Securus's total - a figure that measures the abuse against the wrong denominator. The trust model broke because consent was asserted down a chain of aggregators and never verified at the point of disclosure.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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