https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9k873e/captira-phone-tracking-verizon-tmobile-sprint-securus-locationsmart-bounty-hunters

This week Verizon and other major telcos announced they would stop the sale of customers’ location data to certain third parties. The move came after a wave of media reports and scrutiny from Senator Ron Wyden, which showed that data was ultimately ending up in the hands of low-level law enforcement, letting them track nearly any phone in the US with minimal oversight.

But it wasn’t just cops. Before going through what appears to be a serious rebranding and discontinuing the product, at least one company, Captira, was selling phone geolocation to another market, according to website archives: bounty hunters. The online records highlight the wide spread of use cases for phone location information; data that customers and ordinary citizens likely did not understand has been sold and re-used by multiple industries for years.