Fwd: US cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data | ZDNet

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: José María Mateos <chema () rinzewind org>
> Date: May 16, 2018 at 11:20:29 AM EDT
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: US cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data | ZDNet
>
> For IP, if you want:
>
> https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/
>
> ---
> Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you've probably 
> never heard about before.
>
> In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 
> investigate why Securus, a prison technology company, can track any phone "within seconds" by using data obtained 
> from the country's largest cell giants, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, through an intermediary, 
> LocationSmart.
>
> The story blew up because a former police sheriff snooped on phone location data without a warrant, according The New 
> York Times. The sheriff has pleaded not guilty to charges of unlawful surveillance.
> ---
>
> The current discussion on Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684, has some very interesting bits. 
> An excerpt of the first comment right now:
>
> ---
> I work in location / mapping / geo. Some of us have been waiting for this to blow (which it hasn't yet). The public 
> has zero idea how much personal location data is available.
>
> It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and 
> then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually not 
> in software but by contract, one gives gps data to all the others as part of the bill of materials.
>
> This is then usually (but not always) "anonymized" by cutting it in to ~5 second chunks. It's easy to put it back 
> together again. We can figure out everything about your day from when you wake up to where you go to when you sleep.
>
> This data is sold to whoever wants it. Hedge funds or services who analyze it for hedge funds is the big one. It's 
> normal to track hundreds of millions of people a day and trade stocks based on where they go. This isn't fantasy, 
> it's what happens every day.
> ---
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- 
> José María (Chema) Mateos
> https://rinzewind.org/blog-es || https://rinzewind.org/blog-en



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