Verizon to end location data sales to brokers
Verizon is pledging to stop selling information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy, The Associated Press has learned.
The data has allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly - LocationSmart and Zumigo.
Though Verizon is the first major U.S. wireless carrier to end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others, Verizon did not say it was getting out of the business of selling location data.
Verizon’s chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, said the company would be careful not to disrupt “beneficial services” such as fraud prevention and would “work with these aggregators to ensure a smooth transition for these beneficial services to alternative arrangements so as to minimize the harm to customers and end users.”
The nation’s largest mobile carrier in subscribers count made its disclosure in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies and its affiliate 3C
Interactive. Verizon says their contract was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates.
After a thorough review of its program, Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo, both privately held, that it intends to “terminate their ability to access and use our customers’ location data as soon as possible,” Zacharia wrote.
Location data from Verizon and other carriers makes it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the U.S. within seconds.
Popular commercial uses for so-called geolocation tracking include emergency roadside assistance; keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention and targeted marketing offers.
The cutoff won’t affect users’ ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of selling data to third parties with which users have no direct connection.
Wyden wrote all four major U.S. wireless carriers on May 8 after learning about a web portal that let law officers track Americans’ locations without proper oversight. A former sheriff in Missouri has been accused of using Securus data for unauthorized surveillance of a judge, a sheriff and state highway patrol officers.
Days later, a Carnegie Mellon University security researcher discovered a security flaw in LocationSmart’s website that could have allowed any reasonably sophisticated hacker to secretly track almost any phone in the U.S. or Canada.
Wyden asked the carriers to identify which third parties have been acquiring carrier location data and to provide details such as any third-party sharing of location data without customer consent. His office shared the companies’ responses with The AP.