1630 points by voctor 2847 days ago | 625 comments on HN
| Moderate positive
Contested
Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-28 10:25:52 0
Summary Privacy & Surveillance Advocates
ZDNET investigates the sale of real-time location data by major US cell carriers to third-party data brokers (LocationSmart), who then supply it to companies like Securus. The article exposes a critical loophole in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allows carriers to disclose personal location data to private intermediaries, which can then provide it to law enforcement without proper warrant verification or user consent. Drawing on expert commentary and government documents, the piece advocates for legislative reform and regulatory oversight to close the secondary-disclosure loophole and strengthen privacy protections under Article 12.
The most obvious use of the data appears to be by credit card companies to detect fraudulent use of a card and decline those transactions. This is something I'm relatively comfortable with, though it's plainly in the interests of the bank and I only indirectly benefit from the tracking.
> the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn't restrict disclosure to other companies
Clearly the US has their priorities completely the wrong way.
The way I understood it is that the requester of the location is trusted to have gotten consent from the subject of the query. The providers will answer any queries.
So Securus works on the "we're sure our customers are getting consent for their inquiries" presumption. What are the consequences if a company is found to not have gotten consent? Business sense dictates there to be no consequence at all if Securus can avoid it.
The way this should work is that the carriers can get permission to share location data with third-parties. They should not do it without having gotten permission from their customer. But then they probably get that when you sign the contract. Or do they just not mention it?
I wondered how the spam callers knew what area code I was in while traveling out of state.
I would assume that through clustering analysis (eg coworkers/friends travel together) even fairly coarse position data can allow you to construct relationships. Then they can spam/fish both you end your coworkers with the same fake number. That makes it seem more important to answer and more organic.
* Obtaining consent is entirely left to the provider to implement. It does not appear to have any auditing. A provider can query any number they like.
* The opt-in process used by many providers is easy to exploit, by spoofing SMS replies or abusing the SMS template so that the surveillance target does not get notified
* The providers have are well aware of the potential to exploit this and have been for some time. It has never been resolved in over 10 years.
I am starting to wonder what all have I consented to? Every week I learn I have consented to this and that because of a news article as I never read those contracts or TOS. I wonder if there will be a way to phrase long contracts into bullet list of ideas for someone simple minded like me in the near future.
> Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute, explained in a phone call that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn't restrict disclosure to other companies, who then may disclose that same data to the government.
It seems like intelligence services spend a lot of their time dreaming up ways to do an end-run around the law. This is the same reason US intelligence does partnerships with foreign intelligence services.
I work in location / mapping / geo. Some of us have been waiting for this to blow (which it hasn't yet). The public has zero idea how much personal location data is available.
It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually not in software but by contract, one gives gps data to all the others as part of the bill of materials.
This is then usually (but not always) "anonymized" by cutting it in to ~5 second chunks. It's easy to put it back together again. We can figure out everything about your day from when you wake up to where you go to when you sleep.
This data is sold to whoever wants it. Hedge funds or services who analyze it for hedge funds is the big one. It's normal to track hundreds of millions of people a day and trade stocks based on where they go. This isn't fantasy, it's what happens every day.
Almost every web/smartphone mapping company is doing it, so is almost everyone that tracks you for some service - "turn the lights on when I get home". The web mapping companies and those that provide SDKs for "free". It's a monetization model for apps which don't need location. That's why Apple is trying hard to restrict it without scaring off consumers.
Carriers are also selling your billing records. They offer a service to return the carrier billing address/name based on the mobile number.
Not only this but late last year all 4 of the major US carriers are offering APIs to convert mobile IP to a billing record (name/address/phone number).
It's funny that this is coming up now. The other day I was on the phone with Geico's roadside assistance and they wanted to know my location. I told them I didn't have their app downloaded, they said it wasn't a problem and they could get it without it. Sure enough they could. I checked their disclaimers [1] and they purchase the data from my cell carrier. They didn't even have to know which one.
I was aware the cell phone companies were selling anonymized data for some time (not revealing the numbers and adding some jitter to the location data to avoid identifying users).
This is the first I’m hearing that they’re releasing detailed personal tracking by phone number. When I sat in on a recent presentation with Verizon execs they flat out said they were not doing this. Oops.
For those on T-Mobile, there are privacy settings that can be adjusted here: https://my.t-mobile.com/profile/privacy_notifications/advert... I already had all of them disabled, and I was still able to get the location of my cell phone from LocationSmart.
I chatted with T-Mobile support yesterday to see if I could opt-out of them sharing my data. Not surprisingly, the support agent was less than helpful. "Don't worry, your data is secured"
Are there any US carriers that respect privacy and do not share private information with 3rd parties? Or is that a pipe dream?
There was mild discontent when the Data Retention laws [1] were being rolled out across the EU in the early 2010s. This was a legal harmonization of existing collection practices for law enforcement purposes. It did receive a lot of press coverage and some small protests (even though in reality the collection was already widespread).
In 2009, Malte Spitz (German Green Party politician) sued his telecom provider for all the information they had stored on him in the last 6 moths. He and others made a good (and spooky) visualization showing how it tracked his entire life [2]. He did a TED talk about it [3], which received a spirited applause and unfortunately minor press coverage.
I think many naively bought the idea that all this detailed data was only for LE (maybe a side effect of all the reporting on the Data Retention Laws?), despite constantly seeing clauses in their EULA's saying their data will be shared with third parties.
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People only care about these issues once they become evident and widespread, and they personally are affected. I remember the shock my friends had when Google Maps released the location history feature. Up until then, its just a theoretical concern.
Good demonstrations, hard hitting expositions and good press coverage are essential.
Another 'fun' implication of this are the increasingly large number of sites that try to obtain your phone number either through SMS messages during account setup, two factor authentication, or any other number of ways. The accounts you have on those sites link directly to your physical presence. Taking it one small step further, any accounts on other sites you have linked to those accounts are similarly effected. Taking it one step even your dynamic IP address at any given moment can end up working as a physical identifier.
The amount of information the NSA has on people is going to be phenomenal. It'd be interesting to be able to glimpse the data just to see how much we all give away. Here's to hoping we never once ever end up putting a 'bad' person in high office because the amount of targeted damage somebody could do with this information is just staggering to even consider.
I went to a recruiting event in 2013, or 14 perhaps, for a major telecom network in Canada. They were proudly showcasing their ability and interest to analyze people's data. I was shocked, so I spoke to the hiring manager:
"You should be concerned about google and Microsoft, they have much more data" he said. They do, but much less sensitive data. And I am paying you! And google gives me free excellent services. You are an expensive oligopoly with not the best customer protection track record.
2. I had a free modem from a major network that came with the internet. I used the modem at another location while I was away. I got charged for my usage! The modem was not just a modem, it was sensing more information to their system. That is how they tracked my usage, if that is the only thing they tracked. Their technical customer service avoided any form of discussion. Cancelled my internet line with them, and using VPN for trackable stuff ever since.
I am seriously considering cancelling my cell phone until their practices changes.
If you take that cell phone home with you regularly and don't live in a multi-unit building, it would be relatively trivial to figure out your identity using this data.
Part of the American mythology is that government involvement is always bad. It's hard for me to know if this developed because of the myths of the America Revolution, that a small colony won it alone and not because of external factors, and how much is due to people preaching small government politics. Regardless a distrust of the government seems to be ingrained in the American psyche IMO.
Maybe [1]. I wouldn't count on being protected while outside the EU.
Art. 3 GDPR Territorial scope
Article 3(1) This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
Article 3(2)(a) - the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
Article 3(2)(b) - the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
Article 3(3) This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
"To extend that to adults, The Guardian journalist Ben Goldacre showed recently that someone needs possession of another person's mobile phone for only a couple of minutes to appear to give the consent required under mobile phone companies' current procedures. The person he was tracking never got any of the warning messages that were meant to have been sent to her. Even more scarily, a hacker's website has recently published information telling how to spoof consent without even having to have temporary possession of the target's phone; all that is needed is the number. If someone has a person's number, he can track them. It is not a problem. I know where the website is, but I am not going to tell Members. It is possible to track people just through their phone numbers."
>It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually not in software but by contract, one gives gps data to all the others as part of the bill of materials.
so what's the flow here? is it something like this?: phone gps -> manufacturer installed crapware app -> crapware server -> (various third parties)
wouldn't this be mitigated if you use a custom ROM like lineageos?
Just a heads up: Twilio now offers a metric fuckton of services geared towards SIM-enabled IoT. You can order SIM cards by the pile and then bind them to a Twilio number by activating it in the UI (or via API). So now instead of (or in addition to) simply forwarding traffic from garbage numbers to your real number, you can get Twilio numbers that are registered on T-Mobile's network via an actual SIM card, making it much easier to send from your Twilio number than it used to be without it bound to a SIM card. Fairly good price, too. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what happened to Twilio's API as it's now as opaque and awkward as any AWS API (almost as though someone on Twilio's engineering team made the decision to model their API after the way AWS builds their APIs), but the services they offer are as compelling as they always were. I'd give Twilio a solid D for what the API has turned into, but A+ for service innovation.
I can confirm this is happening, I designed some of the analysis systems used. Contrary to what many people assume, this is not just a US thing. It is done throughout the industrialized world to varying degrees, including countries where most people believe privacy protections disallow such activity. Governments tacitly support it because they've found these capabilities immensely useful for their own purposes.
A friend of mine just got back from NYC and then received a fake call from an NYC area code. I get several every day from random area codes, and we had to wonder whether it was coincidence or not.
Through FISA, all foreigners are legal monitorable, no matter what.
This is part of how US mass surveillance works. We record everything and if it turns out to be a citizen, we're supposed to throw it out. Of course in reality, it goes to the Parallel Construction Department who uses the information to build a case against someone through other means, knowing the answer in advance.
Until/unless they modify the law - turning off your phone thwarts it. While your phone is powered off, it has no ability to track & record your location movements. Obviously your active location will then be picked back up after you power it on, it won't have a record of anything inbetween.
A simple example of limiting the invasiveness using this approach, would be to have your phone on only at work & home, or similar. In absence of phone snooping, someone can already easily locate you at those two standard destinations, and can easily discover when you'd typically be at those places (ie you're not giving them much by using your phone there under normal circumstances).
I'm in the space as well. I've tried telling my congressmen but they ignore me. I'm waiting for the backlash, especially will all the recent privacy issues. It hasn't happened yet and the problem is so large that I honestly doubt whether the public will ever truly grasp what the scope.
The advice I always give when this topic comes up us to be very careful with what you install on your phone. The least expensive mobile location data tends to come from random apps collecting the data to sell it, and ad networks. Permission to use your GPS is permission to track you until you uninstall the app.
Core content: comprehensive investigation of privacy violation. Article documents real-time location data sales without adequate consent, exposes ECPA loophole enabling secondary disclosure, quotes expert analysis, and calls for legislative protection.
FW Ratio: 57%
Observable Facts
The article states 'Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company' (LocationSmart) and that it was 'obtained from the country's largest cell giants, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint.'
The article quotes Kevin Bankston: 'The Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn't restrict disclosure to other companies, who then may disclose that same data to the government.'
The article documents LocationSmart allows 'implied' consent in cases where 'the nature of the service implies that location will be used.'
The article reports Senator Wyden 'called on each carrier to stop sharing data with third parties.'
Inferences
The secondary disclosure loophole in ECPA enables mass surveillance without meaningful consent.
'Implied consent' standards are insufficient to protect privacy rights when users cannot opt-out of location tracking.
The article positions privacy protection as a matter requiring urgent legislative and regulatory action.
Article advocates for legal and social order that protects privacy through enforceable rules and legislative action.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
The article quotes Kevin Bankston: 'It's important for us to close off that potential loophole and that can easily be done with one line of legislative language.'
Inferences
The article frames privacy protection as requiring enforceable social and legal order, not just voluntary compliance.
Site publishes the article freely, enabling broad public access to privacy-protection information. Comments section allows community engagement on the issue.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
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