Early in January, Motherboard’s Joseph Cox broke a blockbuster story about how America’s mobile carriers sold access to their customers’ realtime location data to many shady marketing brokers, who then quietly slipped that data to bounty hunters and other unsavory characters — a practice that they’d been caught in before and had “>falsely promised to end.
Continue reading “Bounty hunters and stalkers are able to track you in realtime by lying to your phone company and pretending to be cops”
Tag: bounty hunters
Leak reveals that hundreds of bounty hunters have had access to super-fine-grained mobile location data for years
After a blockbuster report in Motherboard revealed that bounty hunters were able to buy realtime location data that originated with three of the four major cellular carriers (the exception is Verizon), the carriers scrambled to spin the news, insisting that the bounty hunter access represented a recent, small-scale aberration, but a new set of leaks reported on in Motherboard reveals that the practice has gone on for years, at industrial scale, and that the resellers who supplied bail bondsmen and other unsavory types in secret have changed names, but are still in business.
Continue reading “Leak reveals that hundreds of bounty hunters have had access to super-fine-grained mobile location data for years”
Data-broker implicated in bounty-hunters’ access to mobile location data lobbied FCC to fight consent for sharing location data
When Motherboard broke the story of a thriving underground in bounty-hunters and other unsavory sorts buying realtime location data from America’s cellular carriers, many were outraged that the carriers had not lived up to their year-old promises to fix that massive hole in our location data.
Continue reading “Data-broker implicated in bounty-hunters’ access to mobile location data lobbied FCC to fight consent for sharing location data”