After broken promise, AT&T says it’ll stop selling phone location data

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Witthaya Prasongsin)

Mobile carriers are again promising to stop selling your phone location data to other companies-this time for real.

The four major carriers pledged to stop selling customer location data to third-party data brokers in June 2018, but a Motherboard investigation published this week found that T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were still doing so.

Earlier this week, AT&T said it "only permit[s] sharing of location when a customer gives permission for cases like fraud prevention or emergency roadside assistance or when required by law." But the Motherboard investigation showed that the data was being re-sold on the black market, allowing pretty much anyone to get the location of other people's phones.

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