Recently both AT&T and T-Mobile have announced that they will be ending the sale of location data of their customers to third-party companies. This was hot on the heels of a report from Motherboard where the author, for $300, managed to get a bounty hunter to track down the location of a phone based on location data sold by carriers.Naturally this sparked a lot of outrage since it seemed disturbingly easy and relatively cheap to ping the location of someone without their knowledge. Now it looks like Sprint has announced that they too are promising to end the sale of location data to third-parties, something that the carrier had previously expressed but had yet to get around to.
In a statement made to CNET, Sprint said, “Last year we decided to end our arrangements with data aggregators, but assessed that the negative impacts to customers for services like roadside assistance and bank fraud alerts/protection that would result required a different approach. We implemented new, more stringent safeguards to help protect customer location data, but as a result of recent events, we have decided to end our arrangements with data aggregators.”
These changes are expected to be immediate as the contracts that some of these carriers have are only expected to end in the coming months.