Remember last year when that story came out about how all of the major US cell networks are reporting user location data to shady third parties? Remember how all of the telcos posted contrite messages about how they would never, ever share user location data with random third-party companies ever again? Well, surprise: they were lying.
Joseph Cox, for Motherboard:
Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he could find the current location of most phones in the United States.
This situation is flatly unacceptable. T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were all contacted for the above-linked Motherboard piece, and each of them expressed a lot of bullshit, to be frank, about how sorry they are--and about how this is not supposed to happen based on their terms of service, etc. But that kind of bullshit just isn't going to cut it. User data--and the way it is handled by corporations--needs to be heavily regulated. Full stop.
Write your Congressperson.