7 ms·

Verizon, AT&T and Sprint to Limit Sales of Cellphone Location Data

108 points by mcenedella 8y ago

mkempe 8y ago
In Switzerland there is a concept of the "private sphere" [1] and it basically implies that others do not have the right to pry into nor track that sphere. Each individual and family has their own sense of that sphere and of how large it is. Under this concept I cannot conceive of corporations monitoring and tracking people, then selling that information, as is currently done in the US. For instance, in Switzerland it is illegal to create a database on other people without their knowledge and consent. It is stronger than the idea of "privacy" -- its intent is to completely isolate and protect parts of your life from both the political and the public, which includes the commercial. The right to property is part of it. Note that the Wikipedia description of French "vie privée" ("private life") [2] has deeper and more distinct grounding than the one on "privacy" [3] -- the latter claims that this is mainly a US/British legal conceptualization, but the idea of a private life that should be protected has strong historical and a different effective presence in several European legal systems. [1] http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F16104.php http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F16104.php [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vie_privée https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vie_privée [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Home network security never took root in America because so many see themselves not as an exploited nation, but as temporarily embarrassed porn stars and reality TV stars. - Adapted from Ronald Wright
  - extralego 8y ago
    Where did home network security take root?
- chinathrow 8y ago
  Yet even in Switzerland, there are companies having access to cell provider data and therefore location data "behind the carrier firewall". https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/teralytics-wants-to-tap-telcos-big-data-to-help-cities-get-smarter-about-uber-and-lyft/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/teralytics-wants-to-tap-te... "Polzer says it’s using a variety of proprietary techniques to handle the data in a way that preserves user privacy — although he won’t go into too much detail, claiming commercial sensitivity" Folks also call this "Security by obscurity".
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  I don't have a whole lot to support my ideas here, other than a collection of my own ideas etc. When your whole country is about 8.5 million people it must be difficult to ever go anywhere and be a complete stranger. The USA seems to be such a huge land, both geographically and demographically, that I think it lends itself to a variety of groups exploiting others. I don't think The USA is a homogeneous whole. Or, if there were a scale on which various countries could be placed to describe homogeneity The USA would be at the far end of one extreme of that scale. I think that's why The USA seems to be such a hodgepodge of poor planning and action.
  - oblio 8y ago
    > When your whole country is about 8.5 million people it must be difficult to ever go anywhere and be a complete stranger. I know it's not HackerNews material, but: LOL. In a country with 8.5 million people it's not like you're living in a village with 5000 people where you know everyone. I think that once you have more than about 1 million people it's quite feasible to have perfect anonymity. More than that, in Switzerland they speak 4 different languages (German, French, Italian and the Romance language Romansch). The communities are quite separate, it's entirely possible for your average French Swiss to not have much to do with his fellow German Swiss countrymen.
    - cascom 8y ago
      I don’t think the OP was being completely literal, and your point about language barriers is well taken, but in the context of America, Switzerland is the state of Virginia in terms of population (and about 40% of Virginia’s land area). In that context, Swiss national politics is more akin U.S. state level politics, where there tends to be much more cohesion.
      - CaptainZapp 8y ago
        Actually, as a fiercly federalist country politics are very much comparable to a lesser corrupt US. In fact parts of the US system were implemented with the founding of the Swiss Confederation. Namely the two houses. The principle of governance is to push as much power as possible as locally as possible. Communities and cities as well as cantons (states) in Switzerland have a lot of leeway in handling their affairs. As long there's no violation of higher principles. For example a violation of the federal constitution.
- _trampeltier 8y ago
  In switzerland .. ..it is legal to track anyone with a gps tracker on a car. https://steigerlegal.ch/2018/02/02/gps-tracker-urteil/ https://steigerlegal.ch/2018/02/02/gps-tracker-urteil/ ..it is legal for cellphone provider to sell customer position data. Swisscom for sure does it. You have to op-out by yourself.
  - mkempe 8y ago
    Oh, wow. Thanks for the link. [for those who don't grok German] That was a court decision at the State level (Bern) which claims incredibly that since the GPS tracker shows only where a vehicle is located it does not violate the protection of personal data since a person can walk away from the vehicle and no longer be tracked... I expect it will be either fixed by additional legislation or appealed to the (Federal) Supreme Court.
colinbartlett 8y ago
“Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint decide to cut out middlemen and sell directly to location data consumers.”
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't use quotation marks to make it look like quoting someone when you aren't. And could you please not break the site guidelines by posting shallow dismissals? If you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - colinbartlett 8y ago
    That’s fair, thanks dang!
acjohnson55 8y ago
What about T-Mobile?
- ofcrpls 8y ago
  https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/1009168217586061313 https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/1009168217586061313 From earlier today.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Great, so now I have to count on Mr. Legere's judgment of whether a given middleman is "shady". Why is it legal for these companies to sell our data to anyone? This is nuts.
    - iClaudiusX 8y ago
      The FCC in 2016 voted to require that ISPs and mobile providers must get opt-in consent to share or sell customer data. Then in 2017 Congress voted to overturn those rules and prevent the FCC from implementing them in the future in a party-line vote in the House and Senate. Adding further insult to injury, the current FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, represented Securus (the company that sparked this revelation) in 2012 as an attorney. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-private-browsing-history/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-will-stop-selling-your-phones-location-to-data-brokers/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-...
    - jsight 8y ago
      Well, credit card fraud prevention relies on data like this. I don't really have a problem with the credit card fraud service being able to find my location around the time of a swipe. Beyond that? It all looks pretty shady, and I'm afraid this is one case where the slippery slope concept applies very strongly.
gm-conspiracy 8y ago
It will now be leased.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Or bartered, just like Facebook didn't "sell" your data to data brokers, the company just exchanged it for the brokers' own data on you (or others).
paulie_a 8y ago
Does anyone know of a way to simply fake location data? I genuinely don't care if it is technically illegal. Data collection has jumped the shark at this point
- Yizahi 8y ago
  As far as I know some custom ROMs support GPS spoofing, either with fake data or blocking it. But instead you usually get worse camera drivers and some security features may stop working. All of this doesn't matter for network providers since they will always have your location data, by design of GSM network.
- tommyallen 8y ago
  Have your calls forwarded to a service you can answer from your computer. Securely strap your phone to the back of an outdoor cat. Be sure to set a strong passcode so the cat can't use the phone. To keep the phone charged, invent a charger that can convert the kinetic energy of the cat's attempts at walking away from the phone. Use the money earned from your invention to buy more phones.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    You could harvest the energy to charge the phone from a perpetually rotating cat by strapping a piece of buttered toast to its back.
    - delinka 8y ago
      I believe this method is patented and isn’t due to expire for another 12 years.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I doubt that there's any way to fake location based on cell towers. That's all done in the baseband radio, which is not readily user accessible. And even if you could mess with it, it's probably very illegal. It's certainly illegal to spoof mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) because that allows theft of service. It's much easier to disable GPS location capability. But even that's not very reliable, because there are multiple software levels, most of which aren't user controllable. The best option that I know is turning devices off, and keeping them in Faraday bags, except when in use. So you get to pick which locations get reported. You're less reachable, but that's a necessary tradeoff. For long-term storage in Faraday bags, it's important to remove the battery, because otherwise the device may drain it, trying to ping towers, even though "turned off".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rlvesco7 8y ago
Verizon has a section of their site to turn off marketing and adjust privacy settings. Notably absent is the ability to turn off location sharing. I emailed the privacy department and they totally dodged my question. I still would like, and think it's important to have, an option to opt out of all location sharing. I don't care if it's for fraud prevention since that is easily abused by companies.
- josefresco 8y ago
  For those curious, here is where/how to do this with Verizon: Login (verizonwireless.com) > My Profile > Privacy Settings https://nbillpay.verizonwireless.com/vzw/secure/setPrivacy.action https://nbillpay.verizonwireless.com/vzw/secure/setPrivacy.a... "Customer Proprietary Network Information Settings" was enabled. "Business & Marketing Insights" was disabled. "Relevant Mobile Advertising " was enabled. Note, I had to disable Customer Proprietary Network Information Settings twice after I found it was still enabled after my first attempt.
jrs95 8y ago
Don’t worry, the (federal) government will still have no problems getting their hands on it. Any progress on privacy is great, but it doesn’t buy much as long as underlying issues aren’t solved. We still have a legal system that has no issue with nearly unlimited surveillance by the federal government which is set up by what is essentially secret law.
- rlvesco7 8y ago
  Yes, but they have been bypassing due process by using 3rd parties instead of going directly to telecoms. And the friendly folks at Palantir et al are only too happy to share.
  - jrs95 8y ago
    The due process is basically just a rubber stamped sham anyways — the only downside is that there’s a paper trail. But it seems that as a government agency you can just lie to the FISA courts to get your warrants and there won’t be any consequences later.
trumped 8y ago
I was dumb enough to think that anyone would need a warrant to be able to get that information...

108 points by mcenedella 8y ago

In Switzerland there is a concept of the "private sphere" [1] and it basically implies that others do not have the right to pry into nor track that sphere. Each individual and family has their own sense of that sphere and of how large it is. Under this concept I cannot conceive of corporations monitoring and tracking people, then selling that information, as is currently done in the US. For instance, in Switzerland it is illegal to create a database on other people without their knowledge and consent. It is stronger than the idea of "privacy" -- its intent is to completely isolate and protect parts of your life from both the political and the public, which includes the commercial. The right to property is part of it. Note that the Wikipedia description of French "vie privée" ("private life") [2] has deeper and more distinct grounding than the one on "privacy" [3] -- the latter claims that this is mainly a US/British legal conceptualization, but the idea of a private life that should be protected has strong historical and a different effective presence in several European legal systems. [1] http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F16104.php http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F16104.php [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vie_privée https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vie_privée [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy

stephengillie 8y ago
Home network security never took root in America because so many see themselves not as an exploited nation, but as temporarily embarrassed porn stars and reality TV stars. - Adapted from Ronald Wright
- extralego 8y ago
  Where did home network security take root?
chinathrow 8y ago
Yet even in Switzerland, there are companies having access to cell provider data and therefore location data "behind the carrier firewall". https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/teralytics-wants-to-tap-telcos-big-data-to-help-cities-get-smarter-about-uber-and-lyft/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/07/teralytics-wants-to-tap-te... "Polzer says it’s using a variety of proprietary techniques to handle the data in a way that preserves user privacy — although he won’t go into too much detail, claiming commercial sensitivity" Folks also call this "Security by obscurity".
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
I don't have a whole lot to support my ideas here, other than a collection of my own ideas etc. When your whole country is about 8.5 million people it must be difficult to ever go anywhere and be a complete stranger. The USA seems to be such a huge land, both geographically and demographically, that I think it lends itself to a variety of groups exploiting others. I don't think The USA is a homogeneous whole. Or, if there were a scale on which various countries could be placed to describe homogeneity The USA would be at the far end of one extreme of that scale. I think that's why The USA seems to be such a hodgepodge of poor planning and action.
- oblio 8y ago
  > When your whole country is about 8.5 million people it must be difficult to ever go anywhere and be a complete stranger. I know it's not HackerNews material, but: LOL. In a country with 8.5 million people it's not like you're living in a village with 5000 people where you know everyone. I think that once you have more than about 1 million people it's quite feasible to have perfect anonymity. More than that, in Switzerland they speak 4 different languages (German, French, Italian and the Romance language Romansch). The communities are quite separate, it's entirely possible for your average French Swiss to not have much to do with his fellow German Swiss countrymen.
  - cascom 8y ago
    I don’t think the OP was being completely literal, and your point about language barriers is well taken, but in the context of America, Switzerland is the state of Virginia in terms of population (and about 40% of Virginia’s land area). In that context, Swiss national politics is more akin U.S. state level politics, where there tends to be much more cohesion.
    - CaptainZapp 8y ago
      Actually, as a fiercly federalist country politics are very much comparable to a lesser corrupt US. In fact parts of the US system were implemented with the founding of the Swiss Confederation. Namely the two houses. The principle of governance is to push as much power as possible as locally as possible. Communities and cities as well as cantons (states) in Switzerland have a lot of leeway in handling their affairs. As long there's no violation of higher principles. For example a violation of the federal constitution.
_trampeltier 8y ago
In switzerland .. ..it is legal to track anyone with a gps tracker on a car. https://steigerlegal.ch/2018/02/02/gps-tracker-urteil/ https://steigerlegal.ch/2018/02/02/gps-tracker-urteil/ ..it is legal for cellphone provider to sell customer position data. Swisscom for sure does it. You have to op-out by yourself.
- mkempe 8y ago
  Oh, wow. Thanks for the link. [for those who don't grok German] That was a court decision at the State level (Bern) which claims incredibly that since the GPS tracker shows only where a vehicle is located it does not violate the protection of personal data since a person can walk away from the vehicle and no longer be tracked... I expect it will be either fixed by additional legislation or appealed to the (Federal) Supreme Court.

colinbartlett 8y ago

“Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint decide to cut out middlemen and sell directly to location data consumers.”

dang 8y ago
Please don't use quotation marks to make it look like quoting someone when you aren't. And could you please not break the site guidelines by posting shallow dismissals? If you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- colinbartlett 8y ago
  That’s fair, thanks dang!

acjohnson55 8y ago

What about T-Mobile?

ofcrpls 8y ago
https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/1009168217586061313 https://twitter.com/JohnLegere/status/1009168217586061313 From earlier today.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Great, so now I have to count on Mr. Legere's judgment of whether a given middleman is "shady". Why is it legal for these companies to sell our data to anyone? This is nuts.
  - iClaudiusX 8y ago
    The FCC in 2016 voted to require that ISPs and mobile providers must get opt-in consent to share or sell customer data. Then in 2017 Congress voted to overturn those rules and prevent the FCC from implementing them in the future in a party-line vote in the House and Senate. Adding further insult to injury, the current FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, represented Securus (the company that sparked this revelation) in 2012 as an attorney. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-private-browsing-history/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-will-stop-selling-your-phones-location-to-data-brokers/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-...
  - jsight 8y ago
    Well, credit card fraud prevention relies on data like this. I don't really have a problem with the credit card fraud service being able to find my location around the time of a swipe. Beyond that? It all looks pretty shady, and I'm afraid this is one case where the slippery slope concept applies very strongly.

gm-conspiracy 8y ago

It will now be leased.

mtgx 8y ago
Or bartered, just like Facebook didn't "sell" your data to data brokers, the company just exchanged it for the brokers' own data on you (or others).

paulie_a 8y ago

Does anyone know of a way to simply fake location data? I genuinely don't care if it is technically illegal. Data collection has jumped the shark at this point

Yizahi 8y ago
As far as I know some custom ROMs support GPS spoofing, either with fake data or blocking it. But instead you usually get worse camera drivers and some security features may stop working. All of this doesn't matter for network providers since they will always have your location data, by design of GSM network.
tommyallen 8y ago
Have your calls forwarded to a service you can answer from your computer. Securely strap your phone to the back of an outdoor cat. Be sure to set a strong passcode so the cat can't use the phone. To keep the phone charged, invent a charger that can convert the kinetic energy of the cat's attempts at walking away from the phone. Use the money earned from your invention to buy more phones.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  You could harvest the energy to charge the phone from a perpetually rotating cat by strapping a piece of buttered toast to its back.
  - delinka 8y ago
    I believe this method is patented and isn’t due to expire for another 12 years.
mirimir 8y ago
I doubt that there's any way to fake location based on cell towers. That's all done in the baseband radio, which is not readily user accessible. And even if you could mess with it, it's probably very illegal. It's certainly illegal to spoof mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) because that allows theft of service. It's much easier to disable GPS location capability. But even that's not very reliable, because there are multiple software levels, most of which aren't user controllable. The best option that I know is turning devices off, and keeping them in Faraday bags, except when in use. So you get to pick which locations get reported. You're less reachable, but that's a necessary tradeoff. For long-term storage in Faraday bags, it's important to remove the battery, because otherwise the device may drain it, trying to ping towers, even though "turned off".

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rlvesco7 8y ago

Verizon has a section of their site to turn off marketing and adjust privacy settings. Notably absent is the ability to turn off location sharing. I emailed the privacy department and they totally dodged my question. I still would like, and think it's important to have, an option to opt out of all location sharing. I don't care if it's for fraud prevention since that is easily abused by companies.

josefresco 8y ago
For those curious, here is where/how to do this with Verizon: Login (verizonwireless.com) > My Profile > Privacy Settings https://nbillpay.verizonwireless.com/vzw/secure/setPrivacy.action https://nbillpay.verizonwireless.com/vzw/secure/setPrivacy.a... "Customer Proprietary Network Information Settings" was enabled. "Business & Marketing Insights" was disabled. "Relevant Mobile Advertising " was enabled. Note, I had to disable Customer Proprietary Network Information Settings twice after I found it was still enabled after my first attempt.

jrs95 8y ago

Don’t worry, the (federal) government will still have no problems getting their hands on it. Any progress on privacy is great, but it doesn’t buy much as long as underlying issues aren’t solved. We still have a legal system that has no issue with nearly unlimited surveillance by the federal government which is set up by what is essentially secret law.

rlvesco7 8y ago
Yes, but they have been bypassing due process by using 3rd parties instead of going directly to telecoms. And the friendly folks at Palantir et al are only too happy to share.
- jrs95 8y ago
  The due process is basically just a rubber stamped sham anyways — the only downside is that there’s a paper trail. But it seems that as a government agency you can just lie to the FISA courts to get your warrants and there won’t be any consequences later.

trumped 8y ago

I was dumb enough to think that anyone would need a warrant to be able to get that information...