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Telecommunication companies have been selling user location data for years. Some of their "clients" have made tens of thousands of requests, documents obtained by Motherboard – far from the isolated incidents described previously.
About 250 bounty hunters and similar companies have purchased extremely accurate customer location data from Sprint, AT & T and T-Mobile, some of them using tens of thousands of times the service – a system operating in the biggest secret for over five years, allowing trackers to see where their target was in relation to the room they occupied inside a building, according to internal documents obtained from the location seller CerCareOne.
Some of the bounty hunters then resold the whereabouts data to unauthorized third parties, according to many independent sources close to the company, who survived by keeping a trade secret among the community of bail and bounty hunters.
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When Vice unveiled for the first time the sale of user data by telecoms to bounty hunters last month, telecoms struggled to describe these abuses as isolated incidents, claiming that they had ended their relationships with aggregators when they had learned the unauthorized use of data, procedure. CerCareOne, however, has sold not only mobile phone tower data, but also very accurate GPS-badisted data (A-GPS) for five years – from 2012 to the closing of the company in 2017. Five years of management unrestricted data was agreed for "preserve the confidentiality of CerCareOne.com, "internal documents show.
CerCareOne has charged up to $ 1,100 per phone location to provide real-time GPS locations to bail applicants, bail agents and bounty hunters. The company obtained data from a location aggregator, which received them directly from the various telecom operators and packaged them for resale.
"If carriers turn around and use that access to sell information to bounty hunters or anyone, it's a shocking abuse of the trust the public places in them to protect privacy while protecting public safety.Said Blake Reid, badistant clinical professor at Colorado Law. Laura Moy, privacy expert at Georgetown University Law School Laura Moy, said she had never heard of a telecom selling A-GPS data.
None of the telecom companies refused to sell the users 'location data when asked, and the bonding companies listed in the documents do not indicate whether they were allowed to track users' phones. Some of them were interviewed more than 18,000 times in a year, although some agents claimed that their clients had signed contracts allowing agents to follow them electronically if they released on bail. CerCareOne users claim that they must obtain written consent from those they follow, but several sources claim that people who have been followed have never been informed, and Sprint says CerCareOne never requested permission to use or resell customer data.
After the first revelations last month, more than a dozen Senators have written to telecom and location aggregators to request an FCC hearing on this subject, which FCC Director Ajit Pai has refused. , citing the closure of the government. The three telephone companies named in the survey have promised to stop selling location data to aggregators within two months.
Senator Mark Warner Blamed the FCC and FTC for Their "failure"To solve the problem of"companies abusing consumer confidence, "While Senator Ron Wyden accused the telecom of"flagrant and deliberate disregard for the safety of Americans. "
This scandal continues to worsen. The carriers badured their customers that violations of location of violations were isolated incidents. New evidence shows that hundreds of people could follow our phones and have been doing it for years before anyone in the wireless companies acted. https://t.co/I6ITUBYgeH
– Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) February 6, 2019
"FCC must act urgently", said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, referring to the widespread misuse of mobile phone customer data."a question of national and personal security"and expressing concern about the slow pace of the agency in launching an investigation.
The magnitude of this abuse is outrageous.
"[I’m] happy that the company is closed, but it just leaves me wondering how many CerCareOnes we have there, "said Eva Galperin, Cybersecurity Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's digital rights group.
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