Verizon and AT&T will stop selling your phone’s location

3 Comments

1. 2018-06-21 12:11 am

   Alfman verbose=1

   Thom Holwerda,

   Good news for Verizon and AT&T customers, but one has to wonder who’s going to pay for this. They’re going to have to recover the lost income somewhere, and that’s probably going to be, well, you. [/q]

   Possibly, but we also have to consider supply and demand. If neither supply nor demand change, they might not be able to change the price much. So they may loose this source of easy money without finding any way to replace it. If so the decrease in revenue could be reflecting in less earnings for shareholders, or perhaps it translates into fewer raises/bonuses for employees. Whatever the case, it doesn’t necessarily mean higher prices.

   Anyways, the article contains tons of updates such as the following:

   [q](FURTHER UPDATE: Several hours after Legere’s tweet, T-Mobile provided this statement to Wyden’s office: “We ended all transmission of customer data to Securus and will wind down our location aggregator agreements.” Wyden’s office passed T-Mobile’s statement along to Ars.)

   It seems that all these companies were willing to participate in the practice but none of them want to be publicly outed for it. I say good!

   It’s wrong for companies to sell our data without our consent. As usual, they could have avoided this whole mess by making it “opt-in”. It’s the user’s data, sharing can be ethical as long as the user explicitly makes that choice in exchange for a discount.
2. 2018-06-21 6:21 am

   sj87

   Given that these companies are always trying to monetize their customers in any possible way, there’s no one thing to point at as a replacement. Claiming that there will be a “new mean way” to cover up lost ground is simply FUD. The reality is they would do anything they want anyway.

   Edited 2018-06-21 06:22 UTC
3. 2018-06-21 3:06 pm

   Kancept

   They said stop selling. That means it’s now just free.