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

Posted by BeauHD on from the highest-bidder dept.

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.)

4 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. There's no escaping it by jenningsthecat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We ARE the product, and short of bloody revolution there's SFA we can do about it. Time to open that Facebook account I guess - the war has been lost, so I may as well get as much value as I can out of our corporate overlords in return for them raping my privacy.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    1. Re:There's no escaping it by Calydor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe snoring is so common that the makers of this aid just did as they did in the old days - they sent the ad to everyone?

      Not ALL ads are completely tailor-made to each individual user.

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  2. Re:You agreed to this by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Problem is, I don't know what of my currently innocent doings will be considered nefarious in a decade, and neither does anybody else.
    But the information will still be out there.

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  3. Re:Buy a Librem 5 phone instead by Merk42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does the phone come with its own cell phone towers?