Mobile Phone Companies Appear To Be Selling Your Location To Almost Anyone (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: You may remember that last year, Verizon (which owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch) was punished by the FCC for injecting information into its subscribers' traffic that allowed them to be tracked without their consent. That practice appears to be alive and well despite being disallowed in a ruling last March: companies appear to be able to request your number, location, and other details from your mobile provider quite easily. The possibility was discovered by Philip Neustrom, co-founder of Shotwell Labs, who documented it in a blog post earlier this week. He found a pair of websites which, if visited from a mobile data connection, report back in no time with numerous details: full name, billing zip code, current location (as inferred from cell tower data), and more. (Others found the same thing with slightly different results depending on carrier, but the demo sites were taken down before I could try it myself.)

Comments

Re: There's no escaping it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is caused by all those pesky regulations. Verizon has been telling us for years that all we have to do is free their industry from regulations and they would immediately become more altruistic.

Loosening those privacy rules would immediately make all this better. For one, they wouldn't been in violation of said rules anymore.