Cellphone Companies Will Share Your Location Data - Just Not With You
Cellphone companies hold onto your location information for years and routinely provide it to police and, in anonymized form, to outside companies. As they note in their privacy policies, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T …
Context & Ripple Effects
ProPublica's report — picked up by Wired the same day — documents what Verizon, AT&T and Sprint disclose in their own privacy policies: location records are kept for years, handed to police routinely, and sold onward to outside companies in anonymized form, while customers have no equivalent right of access. The timing matters because the raw material is expanding fast: carrier location infrastructure sits atop networks that Verizon alone had pushed past 200 million Americans covered by LTE by late 2011, with more than 300 markets live as of June 21st.
The device side compounds it. Verizon's new Share Everything plans, launched days before this report at $50–$100 price points, put voice, text and data on shared buckets across smartphones and tablets — meaning each account now generates location pings from multiple endpoints rather than one handset, all flowing into the same retention-and-disclosure pipeline the report describes.
First-order effects
- Police can obtain a subscriber's historical location from Verizon, AT&T or Sprint without the customer ever being told, and customers themselves have no policy-granted route to see the same records.
- Outside companies receive carrier location data in anonymized form under existing privacy policies, making law-enforcement access and commercial access two parallel channels off the same retained logs.
Second-order effects
- Verizon's Share Everything structure and its LTE buildout multiply the number of location-reporting devices per account, so the volume of disclosable records grows even if no policy changes — a cost-free inventory expansion for the carriers.
- AT&T and Sprint face an implicit benchmarking problem: because the practices are disclosed in comparable privacy policies across all three carriers, none can differentiate on location privacy without breaking ranks on a shared revenue stream.
Third-order effects
- If retention-plus-disclosure stays the default, carrier location archives harden into standing infrastructure for both policing and commerce, and the gap between what companies know about subscribers and what subscribers can learn about their own files becomes a structural feature of the market rather than an oversight.
- Anonymized commercial sharing sets up the classic re-identification risk: as outside datasets grow richer, 'anonymized' location becomes easier to de-anonymize, which is the kind of failure mode that historically draws regulator attention once it surfaces publicly.
The trend: Cellphone carriers are converting network-generated location data into a routine dual-use asset — disclosed to police on request and monetized in anonymized form — faster than customers gain any visibility into or control over the same records.