Brian Krebs has a good article today on the sale of location data by some of the larger phone companies like AT&T, Verizon et al selling location data to third parties. Verizon said it would stop and AT&T said it would not, though changed its mind after the actions by Verizon were announced.
These were third party agreements that allowed various companies to use location data for some unusual reasons, one being the tracking and monitoring of prisoners in the US justice system. The New York Times exposed this last month. Nobody mentioned social media in this, when the same types of third-party arrangements were more common with social media than we thought a year ago. Congress exposed a lot of them, and will probably be looking into this sooner than later.
I remember hearing the Facebook list of third-party agreements and saying, "Why would they sell them information about my friends?" The answer was obvious - because they could. Then, we found out that not only were they selling data that they had permission from users to share, but they had additional third-party arrangements that didn't require customer consent to share. Facebook has yet to see all the fallout from that one.
If I were in Congress, I would be looking at other agreements these telecoms had to share data with third parties. I know I didn't sign up for blanket consent to share my data with someone else, but as Facebook would say, "It's not your data." The difference is I pay my mobile fees every month so they aren't providing me a free service like Facebook used to. I dropped my Facebook account over the third-party arrangements with no consent, and would do the same for any service provider that sells location data to others.
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