Verizon, AT&T rein in location-data sellers after flap

Bloomberg

Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. will rein in third-party selling of their phone-location data after a prison contractor let law-enforcement officers track wireless customers without authorisation.
The two largest US wireless carrier announced the move in response to a plea from Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. The legislator had demanded last month that carriers and the Federal Communications Commission investigate the practice of tracking phones by Securus Technologies Inc., which provides telecom services to prisons and jails.
The situation has renewed concerns about user privacy in the US, following revelations this year about Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that used Facebook Inc. customer data without consent.
“When these issues were brought to our attention, we took immediate steps to stop it,” Rich Young, a Verizon spokesman, said in an email. “Customer privacy and security remain a top priority for our customers and our company. We stand by that commitment to our customers.”
Securus’s primary purpose is letting inmates communicate with the outside world. For instance, it offers prepaid debit cards for prisoners to make phone calls and helps set up videoconferencing between inmates and their families.

Unauthorised Use
But it drew outcry after developing a website that let law-enforcement officials find people — including non-inmates — using the location of their phones. For instance, a Missouri sheriff used the tracking service to target a judge and other law-enforcement officers, according to a New York Times story.
When Wyden voiced concerns about Securus last month, he noted that wireless carriers are only supposed to provide real-time location data to law-enforcement agencies after a court order is obtained. Securus users — typically law-enforcement and correctional facilities — were able to sidestep the usual court-authorised requirements on tracking customer locations.
The practice skirts the carriers’ “legal obligation to be the sole conduit by which the government conducts surveillance of Americans’ phone records, and needlessly exposes millions of Americans to potential abuse and surveillance by the government,” Wyden said at the time. The Securus flap also spotlighted the use of third-party data aggregators by Verizon and AT&T.