| Hi there,
Did you know that for $300 a bounty hunter (or anyone else) could figure out your location using data your wireless provider sold to them?
That’s right. Major U.S. cellular carriers like AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have been selling their customers’ location information and letting it fall into the hands of actual bounty hunters according to reporting from Vice’s Motherboard.1
Think this is outrageous, not to mention dangerous? Tell the FCC to investigate and put a stop to this practice (once the government is back open).
But how is this even possible and doesn’t it violate some privacy law or something?
Buried in many wireless carriers’ customer-privacy policies is a provision that allows them to sell access to their customers’ location information. These providers then sell that information to data brokers, advertising networks, banks and other (supposedly) “reputable” companies.
Companies like AT&T claim that sharing their customers’ location information helps with “important, potential lifesaving services” and that less-than-savory uses, like selling that information to bounty hunters, would “violate our contract and Privacy Policy.”2 Yet these privacy scandals keep happening and all these companies offer are empty promises that they’ll assess their practices and change them (maybe).
Enough is enough. We need the FCC to step in and to protect our data from wireless carriers hell-bent on violating our privacy. Tell the FCC to do its job and finally put an end to these abuses.
The FCC has a legal obligation to make sure that wireless carriers protect their customers' location information — and it could investigate if it weren’t asleep at the wheel.3 (And at the moment, if it weren’t for the Trump shutdown hindering all sorts of essential government functions too.)
Yet the Pai FCC has been remarkably unwilling to enforce its own rules and has shown little interest in protecting wireless customers from these kinds of abuses. That’s why we need to put public pressure on the agency: Sign our petition calling on the FCC to protect customer-location data from greedy wireless providers that are selling it to third parties.
Cable and phone companies already know so much about us and are itching to make even more money off of that data. When it comes to protecting the privacy of their customers, the law's already on the books. Urge the FCC to investigate these privacy violations and protect their customers from corporate greed.
Thanks for all you do—
Gaurav, Lucia, Amy and the rest of the Free Press team
freepress.net
P.S. Your wireless provider may be selling your location information to actual bounty hunters. Urge the FCC to put a stop to these kinds of abuses.
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1. “I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone,” Motherboard, Jan. 8, 2019: https://act.freepress.net/go/30115?t=10&akid=12023%2E10296224%2Ed32Gxd 2. “Largest Cellphone Carriers to Limit Sales of Location Data,” The New York Times, June 19, 2018: https://act.freepress.net/go/30116?t=12&akid=12023%2E10296224%2Ed32Gxd 3. “Bounty Hunters Spying on You? FCC Doesn't Care,” Free Press, Jan. 11, 2019: https://act.freepress.net/go/30117?t=14&akid=12023%2E10296224%2Ed32Gxd |
