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In January, Motherboard found that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint were unwittingly compromising their user's privacy and security. The telecommunication giants were reportedly selling data to third parties in bulk, a practice they've been criticized for before, who in turn were selling data about specific customers to "bounty hunters" that can locate nearly any phone in the U.S. for about $300. Telecoms claimed they were going to address the issue, but the publication kept digging, and earlier this week, they released a new series of reports claiming that practice was not an "isolated incident." They say that around 250 bounty hunters had access to the location data, some of whom accessed it "thousands or tens of thousands of times." Additionally, some of the requests used GPS data instead of cell tower data, which is sometimes accurate enough to tell where a user is inside a building.
A list of a particular customer's use of the phone location service obtained by Motherboard stretches on for around 450 pages, with more than 18,000 individual phone location requests in just over a year of activity. The bail bonds firm that initiated the requests-known in the industry as phone pings-did not respond to questions asking whether they obtained consent for locating the phones, or what the pings were for. "The scale of this abuse is outrageous," Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at campaign group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard in an email.
A list of a particular customer's use of the phone location service obtained by Motherboard stretches on for around 450 pages, with more than 18,000 individual phone location requests in just over a year of activity. The bail bonds firm that initiated the requests-known in the industry as phone pings-did not respond to questions asking whether they obtained consent for locating the phones, or what the pings were for. "The scale of this abuse is outrageous," Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at campaign group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard in an email.
