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Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Selling Customers’ Location Data

The lawsuits come after a Motherboard investigation showed AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile sold phone location data that ended up with bounty hunters, and The New York Times covered an instance of Verizon selling data.

On Thursday, lawyers filed lawsuits against four of the US major telecommunications companies for their role in various location data scandals uncovered by Motherboard, Senator Ron Wyden, and The New York Times.

Each case is being put forward in the name of at least one subscriber but is being made on behalf of millions of customers. An estimated subscriber count for the period April 30, 2015 to February 15, 2019 means that in total 300 million subscribers are being represented; 100 million each for Verizon and AT&T, and 50 million each for T-Mobile and Sprint.

The suits will ultimately come down to whether or not the firms violated section 222 of the Federal Communications Act (FCA), which obliges companies to protect confidential information from unauthorised third parties.

The complaints against T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are largely identical, and all also mention how each carrier ultimately provided data to a company called Securus, which allowed low level law enforcement to locate phones without a warrant, as The New York Times first reported in 2018. The complaint against Verizon focuses just on the Securus case. However, Motherboard previously reported how Verizon sold data that ended up in the hands of another company, called Captira, which then sold it to the bail bondsman industry.

After Motherboard’s January investigation, 15 Senators called for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to properly investigate the sale of phone location data to bounty hunters. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce asked FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to hold an emergency briefing on the issue; Pai refused.

Motherboard also previously reported that 250 bounty hunters had access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint phone location data from another company that catered specifically to the bail bond industry. Some of that data included highly precise assisted GPS data, which is usually reserved for 911 responders.

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