How LocationSmart, which has “direct connections” to major US carriers including AT&T and Verizon, sells millions of Americans' real-time phone location data
and there's not much you can do about it. https://zd.net/2IhoSya
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands at the center of a widening location-data scandal: days later, a flaw in LocationSmart's own website let anyone track people across North America without consent (the LocationSmart website bug), and the company was soon lumped with Securus as evidence that carrier-fed location dealing deserved more scrutiny than Cambridge Analytica got (the Securus comparison).
The mechanism matters as much as the scandal: LocationSmart's 'direct connections' to AT&T and Verizon mean the carriers are not leaking data through sloppy apps — they are selling it by design, the same pipeline Senator Wyden would later force all four major carriers to reexamine (Wyden's probe into carrier location sales).
First-order effects
- AT&T and Verizon are exposed as willing suppliers in a market where millions of subscribers' real-time locations change hands without their knowledge or any opt-out.
- LocationSmart's business model — reselling carrier feeds to third parties — becomes publicly legible, turning its carrier contracts into political liabilities rather than assets.
Second-order effects
- All four carriers, including T-Mobile and Sprint, are pushed into reviewing whom they sell location data to once Wyden's inquiry makes continued silence untenable.
- Middlemen downstream of the carriers face the same spotlight: a later investigation showed how cheaply and easily real-time location could be bought from these channels, inviting buyers and regulators alike to trace the supply chain back to its source.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, carrier location data shifts from an unpriced revenue stream to a regulated one, with consent requirements forcing the entire dealer ecosystem — LocationSmart, Securus, app-level brokers feeding 75+ companies — to justify every hop in the chain.
- The episode becomes a template for how data-rights enforcement reaches infrastructure: not through consumer lawsuits over individual apps like AccuWeather, but through congressional pressure applied directly to the network operators who control the tap.
The trend: Cell-carrier location data is moving from an opaque business-to-business commodity toward a consent-and-regulation battleground, with each publicized leak forcing the carriers that sit at the source to retreat from the resale market.