Data Broker That Sold Phone Locations Used by Bounty Hunters Lobbied FCC to Scrap User Consent

Data Broker That Sold Phone Locations Used by Bounty Hunters Lobbied FCC to Scrap User Consent

5 years ago
Anonymous $Dftgs0JzgE

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbwgw8/zumigo-phone-location-data-sold-lobbied-fcc-consent

Earlier this month Motherboard showed how T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint were selling cell phone users’ location data that ultimately ended up in the hands of bounty hunters and people unauthorized to handle it. That data trickled down from the telecommunications giants through a complex network of middlemen and data brokers. One of those third parties was Zumigo, a company that gets location data access directly from the telcos and then sells it for a profit.

Motherboard has now unearthed a presentation that Zumigo gave to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late 2017 in which it asked the agency to place even fewer restrictions on how some of the data it sells can be used, and specifically asked for the agency to loosen user consent requirements for data sharing.