LOCATION DATA SHARING from wireless carriers has been a major privacy issue in recent years. Marketers, salespeople, and even bounty hunters were able to pay shadowy third-party companies to track where people have been, using information that carriers gathered from interactions between your phone and nearby cell towers. Even after promises to stop selling the data, the major carriers—AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon—reportedly continued the practice in the US until the Federal Communications Commission proposed nearly $200 million in combined fines. Carriers remain perennially hungry to know as much about you as they can. Now, researchers are proposing a simple plan to limit how much bulk location data they can get from cell towers.
