Leak reveals that hundreds of bounty hunters have had access to super-fine-grained mobile location data for years

After a blockbuster report in Motherboard revealed that bounty hunters were able to buy realtime location data that originated with three of the four major cellular carriers (the exception is Verizon), the carriers scrambled to spin the news, insisting that the bounty hunter access represented a recent, small-scale aberration, but a new set of leaks reported on in Motherboard reveals that the practice has gone on for years, at industrial scale, and that the resellers who supplied bail bondsmen and other unsavory types in secret have changed names, but are still in business.

Motherboard's Joseph Cox reports on a trove of internal documents from a defunct company called Cercareone, who sold cheap access to bounty hunters for years, allowing some firms to make tens of thousands of requests for their targets' location. The data Cercareone sold included so-called "A-GPS data," which can identify targets to a much finer detree than mere cell-tower location, zeroing in on specific locations within houses and other structures. This data is exclusively available through cellular carriers, hinting at a second, even-more-compromising data-sales market never before revealed.

Cercareone's data was supplied by a "location aggregator" called Locaid, which dealt direct with the carriers. Locaid was sold to Locationsmart in 2015, which continued to supply data to Cercareone until 2017. Cercareone claimed that every person tracked with its data had signed a "privacy waiver," though this appears to have been a lie.

Bounty hunters who contracted with Cercareone were required to sign a confidentiality agreement promising to keep the company's existence a secret. Read the rest