Senators Call On FCC To Investigate Carriers Selling Location Data To Bounty Hunters

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Tuesday, Motherboard revealed that major American telcos T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are selling customer location data of users in an unregulated market that trickles down to bounty hunters and people not authorized to handle such information. In our investigation, we purchased the real-time location of a cell phone from a bail industry source for $300, pinpointing it to a specific part of Queens, New York. The issue potentially impacts hundreds of millions of cell phone users in the United States, with customers likely unaware that their location data is being sold and resold through multiple companies, with even the telcos sometimes having little idea where it ends up and how it is used.

Now, Senators and a commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have urged government bodies to investigate, with some calling for regulation that would ensure customers are properly made aware of how their data is being sold. 'The American people have an absolute right to the privacy of their data, which is why I'm extraordinarily troubled by reports of this system of repackaging and reselling location data to unregulated third party services for potentially nefarious purposes. If true, this practice represents a legitimate threat to our personal and national security,' Senator Kamala Harris told Motherboard in a statement. Harris explicitly called on the FCC to investigate the issue. 'The FCC needs to immediately investigate these serious security concerns and take the necessary steps to protect the privacy of American consumers,' she said. On Tuesday, FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel tweeted: 'The FCC needs to investigate. Stat.' 'It shouldn't be that you pay a few hundred dollars to a bounty hunter and then they can tell you in real time where a phone is within a few hundred meters. That's not right. This entire ecosystem needs some oversight,' she added on MSNBC's Velshi & Ruhle show on Wednesday. 'I think we've got to get to this fast.' Senators Mark Warner and Ron Wyden are also calling on the FCC to act.

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