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On Thursday, lawyers sued four of the country's largest telecommunications companies for their role in several location data scandals revealed by Motherboard's Senator Ron Wyden. The New York Times. Bloomberg Law was the first to report the lawsuits.
The news provides the first instance of private phone company customers who were seeking damages after Motherboard revealed in January that AT & T, T-Mobile and Sprint had all sold access to the company. 39, real-time location of their customers' phones to a network of intermediary companies. before ending up in the hands of bounty hunters. Previously, the motherboard had paid $ 300 to a source to successfully locate a T-Mobile phone in this data supply chain.
"By its negligent and deliberate acts, including inexplicable breaches of its own privacy policy, T-Mobile has allowed access to the CPI and the CPNI of the complainants and group members," reads the statement. complaint, referring to "confidential confidential information". "Customer's proprietary network information", the latter including location data.
The complaints against T-Mobile, AT & T and Sprint are largely identical and all also mention how each carrier ultimately provided data to a company called Securus, which allowed low-level command and control forces. to locate phones without a warrant, such as The New York Times reported for the first time in 2018. The complaint against Verizon relates solely to the Securus case. However, Motherboard had previously indicated how Verizon had sold data that had been entrusted to another company, Captira, which had then sold it to the bonded wards sector.
Do you know anything else about selling location data? You can contact Joseph Cox safely on Signal at +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, on the OTR chat on [email protected] or by email at [email protected] .
The class in each lawsuit covers an approximation of the number of individual customers of telecom operators between April 30, 2015 and February 15, 2019: 100 million for Verizon, 100 million for AT & T, 50 million for T-Mobile and 50 million for Sprint. Each complaint is filed on behalf of at least one customer for each telecommunication company, which claims unspecified damages to be determined at trial, reads the complaints.
The complaint focuses on whether each telephone operator has violated Section 222 of the Federal Communications Act (FCA), which states that companies are required to protect the IPC and the IPCN of their clients, and whether the applicant's IPNI and group members were accessible. to unauthorized third parties during the relevant period.
The lawsuits were filed by Z LAW, a "consumer protection law firm," according to its website.
Part of the complaint against T-Mobile. Image: Screen capture.
"We are currently reviewing the legal deposit and have no other comments yet," Sprint spokesperson Motherboard said in an email.
"We can not comment on an ongoing dispute," wrote a T-Mobile spokesperson in an email.
Verizon and AT & T did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When, in January, Motherboard reported that AT & T, T-Mobile and Sprint had sold their customer data to companies that ultimately provided them to bounty hunters and other unauthorized persons to manipulate them. , every phone company had said stop selling the phone location data -party quite. AT & T and T-Mobile had previously told Motherboard that they had already done so, and Sprint announced their intention to do so by the end of May. Verizon made its own commitments after the 2018 Securus scandal.
After the Motherboard investigation in January, 15 Senators asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to properly investigate the sale of phone tracking data to bounty hunters. . The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has asked FCC President Ajit Pai to hold an emergency information meeting on the issue. Pai refused.
Previously, Motherboard also reported that 250 bounty hunters had access to the AT & T, T-Mobile, and Sprint telephone location data from another company specifically interested in the surety sector. Some of these data included very accurate GPS assisted data, generally reserved for 911 respondents.
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