May 18
Mobile Giants: Please Don’t Share the Where
Your mobile phone is giving away your approximate location all day long. This isn’t exactly a secret: It
has to share this data with your mobile provider constantly to provide better call quality and to route any emergency 911 calls straight to your location. But now, the major mobile providers in the United States —
AT&T,
Sprint,
T-Mobile and
Verizon — are selling this location information to third party companies — in real time — without your consent or a court order, and with apparently zero accountability for how this data will be used, stored, shared or protected.
Think about what’s at stake in a world where
anyone can track your location at any time and in real-time. Right now, to be free of constant tracking the only thing you can do is remove the
SIM card from your mobile device never put it back in unless you
want people to know where you are.
It may be tough to put a price on one’s location privacy, but here’s something of which you can be sure: The mobile carriers are selling data about where you are at any time, without your consent, to third-parties for probably far less than you might be willing to pay to secure it.
The problem is that as long as anyone but the phone companies and law enforcement agencies with a valid court order can access this data, it is always going to be at extremely high risk of being hacked, stolen and misused.
