Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint -- three of the Big Four carriers in the United States -- have decided to end their contracts with location aggregators, mainly to ensure that there will be no misuse of location information (some of them real time) going forward.
Karen Zacharia, the chief privacy officer of Verizon Wireless, has sent a letter addressed to Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat from Oregon), stating that the Big Red is indeed terminating its contract with location aggregators such as Zumigo and LocationSmart. National mobile operators like Verizon are allowed to sell real time location information to third party partners, and that info is sometimes utilized for target marketing purposes by advertisers, and for other business uses. The largest wireless service provider in the country even made special mention of services such as truck rental firms that take full advantage of location information gathered from mobile devices in order to provide assistance to customers stuck on the road.
And while that example in the preceding sentence makes a lot of sense, there are other parties to abuse their access to location information. In Missouri, a former sheriff had utilized Securus Technologies (which tracks phone calls made to prison inmates) in order to trace a judge and five other cops. And who can forget LocationSmart -- more than a month ago, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had opened an investigation into the phone tracking firm, after a researched had discovered that LocationSmart’s official website had contained a flaw, which could be exploited by hackers who wanted to gain access to users’ real time location data.
AT&T has since followed the Big Red’s move -- according to a spokesperson for the carrier, it is canceling its contracts with location trackers, stressing that its first priority is to provide protection for its subscribers’ personal information. The company did qualify, however, that the cancellation will be done as soon as practical, without severely impacting other services like emergency road assistance.
Also making a similar decision is Sprint, who has issued a statement saying that it had already suspended all services with LocationSmart since May 25th. On top of that, the number four mobile operator in America is also looking to start the process of ending its contracts with location data aggregators after completing a comprehensive internal review.
But wait -- what about T-Mobile? While the Uncarrier did not explicitly state that it is terminating its contracts with location aggregators, its chief executive officer, John Legere, did post a tweet saying it will not be selling customer location information to shady third parties.
