Carriers Promise To Stop Selling Your Location To Data Brokers

Our smartphones have practically become extensions of our bodies and lives, holding the keys not just to our captured memories but, often, also to online accounts and even money. Most users take for granted how much of our data we let companies access through our smartphones but, sometimes, the long arm of the law does finally catch up with the times. Responding to inquiries by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore), AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon all pledged to stop selling phone location data to data brokers. That promise, however, comes with a big "but".

This sudden change in business practice was brought about by a recent report on how one such broker, Securus Technologies, allowed a former Missouri sheriff to track a judge, a fellow sheriff, and highway patrol officers without any warrant. In this case, Securus acts as a middleman, acquiring location data from Verizon and supposedly selling it to law enforcement agencies for legal purposes. Such data, however, is provided without the phone owner's knowledge, much less consent.

This prompted Sen. Wyden to send letters to the four major US carriers about this lucrative but unregulated business practice. Perhaps smelling a more expensive scandal, Verizon got the ball rolling by stating it will cease selling location data to such middlemen. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile made similar pledges afterward, Associated Press reports.

That doesn't mean, however, that carriers will stop their business of selling location data, just that they won't be selling it to third-parties that users don't have direct contact with or have given consent to. On the one hand, providing such data benefits emergency operations and fraud prevention systems. On the other hand, it can also be used for marketing and, well, tracking.

While this move by carriers deals a severe blow to the location aggregation market, it's still unknown how large that market is or how many users have already been affected by the long-standing business practice. Privacy advocates also point out how woefully inadequate current regulations are in dealing with such lapses and how carriers themselves seem to be unable to police the use of their own location data.