Bounty hunters and stalkers are able to track you in realtime by lying to your phone company and pretending to be cops

Early in January, Motherboard's Joseph Cox broke a blockbuster story about how America's mobile carriers sold access to their customers' realtime location data to many shady marketing brokers, who then quietly slipped that data to bounty hunters and other unsavory characters -- a practice that they'd been caught in before and had falsely promised to end.

Since then, things have only gotten worse, with revelations that the companies involved had lobbied for lax privacy rules, arguing that they could be trusted to police themselves; meanwhile, Trump's loathesome FCC Chairman Ajit Pai stonewalled Congress and America on his agency's actions on the practice.

Now Cox has another blockbuster: bounty hunters don't need to use back-channels to procure location information from data-brokers: they can skip the middlemen and simply call up your phone company and pretend to be a cop hoping to find someone who has gone missing, or been the victim of a crime, and the carriers often give them all the data they want, including fine-grained E-911 data that can locate you within a few feet, even indoors.

What's more, it's not just bounty hunters who use this trick: men with histories of spousal abuse, stalkers and other predators seeking to locate their prey make liberal use of it.

There are even professional cop-impersonators who offer location data as a service: pay them and they will call up a carrier and fraudulently obtain your target's location for you.

Thanks to the poor due-diligence at the carriers, this practice seems to be widespread. Read the rest