Why Is Your Location Data No Longer Private?
Summary: Congress voted 50-48 in the Senate on March 23, 2017 to repeal FCC privacy rules adopted in 2016 that would have required Internet providers to get opt-in consent before collecting, sharing or selling sensitive data including location, browsing and app usage, and President Trump signed the repeal on April 3, 2017. KrebsOnSecurity reported that LocationSmart leaked a real-time location lookup tool to anyone through a buggy web component for years, that Securus Technologies sold real-time location lookups to state and local law enforcement and that hackers obtained accounts for dozens of officers, and that bugs at T-Mobile and Comcast exposed customer account details and router credentials.
What's compelling: The carriers say they do not share location data without consent, yet the LocationSmart flaw let anyone look up any subscriber's precise location in real time without consent, and the FTC - which regains broadband authority on June 11, 2018 - can only act after harm has occurred, not before.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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