The wireless companies will still sell tracking information, but not to businesses that market it to others without cellphone users’ knowledge or consent.<\/b>
\nVerizon and AT&T have pledged to stop providing information on phone owners\u2019 locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy.
The data has apparently allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners\u2019 knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly \u2013 LocationSmart and Zumigo
Verizon became the first major carrier to declare it would end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others. It did so in a June 15 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. AT&T followed suit Tuesday after the Associated Press reported the Verizon move.
Neither company said they are getting out of the business of selling location data. Verizon and AT&T are the two largest U. S. mobile carriers in terms of subscribers.
Chief privacy officer Karen Zacharia said Verizon would be careful not to disrupt \u201cbeneficial services\u201d such as fraud prevention and emergency roadside assistance. In an email to the AP, AT&T spokesman Jim Greer cited similar reasons for cutting off the intermediaries \u201cas soon as practical.\u201d
Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies and its affiliate 3C Interactive. Verizon says their contract was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates.
Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo, both privately held, that it intends to \u201cterminate their ability to access and use our customers\u2019 location data as soon as possible,\u201d Zacharia wrote.
Location data from Verizon and other carriers makes it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the U. S. within seconds. Popular commercial uses for the information include keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention; and targeted marketing offers.
The cutoff won\u2019t affect users\u2019 ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of providing data to third parties with which users have no direct contact.
Wyden wrote all four major U. S. wireless carriers on May 8 after learning about a web portal that let law officers track Americans\u2019 locations without proper oversight. A former sheriff in Missouri has been accused of using Securus data for unauthorized surveillance of a judge, a sheriff and state highway patrol officers.
Days later, a Carnegie Mellon University security researcher discovered a security flaw in LocationSmart\u2019s website that could have allowed any reasonably sophisticated hacker to secretly track almost any phone in the U. S. or Canada.
Wyden asked the carriers to identify which third parties have been acquiring carrier location data and to provide details such as any third-party sharing of location data without customer consent. His office shared the companies\u2019 responses with The AP.
None of the four carriers named any third parties, with two exceptions. One was Securus, which all four carriers have since cut off. The other was 3C Interactive, the reseller that supplied Securus.
\u201cVerizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies off,\u201d Wyden said in a statement, referring to the aggregators as \u201cshady middle men.\u201d
\u201cThe big concern was that this was probably the tip of the iceberg,\u201d said Laura Moy, deputy director of the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology. She said Verizon\u2019s move \u201cindicates that it cannot actually police this process, that it doesn\u2019t have the ability.\u201d Nor can the other carriers, she said.
Verizon and AT&T did not respond to questions from the AP on whether and how they plan to sell location data directly to companies or individuals instead of relying on the two California companies. Sprint and T-Mobile did not immediately respond Tuesday to emailed requests for comment.
AT&T and T-Mobile, No. 2 and 3 in customers, said in letters to Wyden that they only allow authorized third parties to access customer location data if the affected customers have given consent or if it is required by law \u2013 for instance, a court order. Verizon said the same.
The carriers left most of Wyden\u2019s questions unanswered \u2013 such as how many of their customers had been affected by location-sharing they never agreed to.
Moy said Verizon may have been motivated by a $1.4 million FCC fine for an earlier episode in which the company quietly tracked its wireless customers\u2019 online travels with a \u201csupercookie\u201d for at least 22 months beginning in December 2012. The company subsequently signed a consent order with the FCC promising to restrict that tracking to customers who affirmatively agreed to it.
The case also spurred FCC rules that would have required carriers to obtain consent for selling their customers\u2019 wireless location data. But the Republican-led Congress quashed those rules last year. Analysts say it\u2019s difficult to gauge the size of the location-tracking aggregation market.
On its website, LocationSmart claims it is the No. 1 \u201clocation-as-a-service\u201d provider with data from every top tier U. S. wireless carrier and more than 200 enterprise customers. Zumigo appears oriented to the financial sector, and lists Intel, Wells Fargo and Capital One among investors.
Analyst Rich Mogull of Arizona-based Securosis LLC said telecom providers track and sell location data as a matter of course, with a wide range of businesses, including Google, extensively attempting to compile location datasets on consumers.
\u201cWe are all tracked, all the time, primarily for marketing purposes, by such a large number of companies I \u2018m not sure I would even know where to start the math,\u201d said Mogull.
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