Verizon pledges to stop selling customers' location data to data brokers, like LocationSmart and Zumigo, which it says passed along the info to ~75 other firms
Verizon is pledging to stop sales through intermediaries of data that pinpoints the location of mobile phones to outside companies, the Associated Press has learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
The pledge lands weeks after ZDNet detailed how LocationSmart sells millions of Americans' real-time phone locations through direct connections to major carriers including AT&T and Verizon, and days after Senator Wyden's probe prompted all four US carriers to say they were reexamining the practice.
Verizon is the first to commit to a hard stop, cutting off the two named intermediaries — LocationSmart and Zumigo — which it says passed the data along to roughly 75 other firms. The move converts a congressional inquiry into a concrete supply cut for the entire broker ecosystem.
First-order effects
- LocationSmart and Zumigo lose their Verizon feed immediately, and the ~75 downstream firms that bought through them face a shrinking pool of real-time location supply.
Second-order effects
- AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint can no longer hold the line on selling without standing out as the last suppliers — pressure that culminated in their own commitments to stop by March and, ultimately, letters to the FCC confirming all four had ended the sales.
Third-order effects
- Carrier location data shifts from an open wholesale market toward tightly controlled, consent-based access — with the FCC now holding written commitments from every major carrier, raising the cost of any future quiet re-entry.
The trend: US carriers are exiting the third-party location-data brokerage business under congressional and regulatory scrutiny, moving real-time phone location from a commodity sale to a restricted asset.