The scandals around LocationSmart and Securus, dealers of millions of Americans' real-time cell location data, should be a bigger deal than Cambridge Analytica
Wireless carriers are sharing your real-time location with shady third parties—and a bug lets anyone use that data to track you.
Context & Ripple Effects
Slate's argument lands a week after ZDNet documented LocationSmart's direct connections to AT&T and Verizon for selling real-time phone location, and days after a bug in LocationSmart's own website let anyone track people across North America without consent. The comparison point is deliberate: Cambridge Analytica drew outrage over harvested Facebook data, while carriers were quietly licensing something more immediate — where you are right now.
The arc since then confirms the pattern rather than refuting it: Motherboard showed how cheap and easy it is to buy customers' real-time location through T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T middlemen, the New York Times found apps pinging precise location to 75+ companies thousands of times daily, and by 2021 The Markup sized the whole apparatus as a $12B industry of collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces.
First-order effects
- AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are directly implicated as suppliers: their 'direct connections' and aggregator programs put them upstream of Securus-style resale, making carrier consent practices the immediate target of scrutiny.
- LocationSmart itself is exposed twice over — as a seller whose business model depends on carrier feeds, and as the operator of the buggy portal that proved the data could be pulled by anyone.
Second-order effects
- Middlemen and resellers in the carrier-to-aggregator chain now carry the reputational risk the carriers offloaded onto them, forcing every buyer of real-time location data to justify its source or lose access to the feed.
- The bug converts an abstract privacy debate into a security failure, giving enterprises and app developers a concrete reason to audit which SDKs and partners touch location — the same governance gap the Times' 75-company finding exposed on the app side.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, real-time location becomes regulated like a utility input rather than a marketing asset: the persistence of a $12B market three years after these scandals suggests public outrage alone doesn't unwind a supply chain built on carrier licensing, leaving formal rules as the remaining lever.
- Structurally, the industry is consolidating into layers — carriers as wholesalers, aggregators as exchanges, marketplaces as retail — meaning accountability diffuses across the chain unless regulators pin liability at the source.
The trend: Real-time cell location is maturing into a licensed commodity supply chain — carriers wholesale, aggregators broker, marketplaces retail — with each scandal shifting the fight toward whether liability sits at the source or the point of sale.