“Sprint: The Now Network” Keeps Police Apprised Of Your Present Location
Wired reports that Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with customer location data more than 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009, according to a company manager who disclosed the statistic at a non-public interception and wiretapping conference in October.
The article is an interesting read. Let me summarize: If you have a Sprint phone, law enforcement is able to go to a special Sprint website, enter your phone number, and Sprint will reveal your current location using your cell phone’s GPS. They did this a whopping 8 million times in a one year period.
I anxiously await the fallout from this revelation. With little or no oversight, I’m sure this feature has been abused thousands, if not millions of times. The jealous detective monitoring his girlfriend’s location, the ambitious street cop trolling phone data to link “suspects” to crimes. It could get messy.
I’m not a Sprint customer, but if I were, I would be long gone.
More: The graduate student who broke the story.
More: A discussion thread on Reddit.
