T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.
This type of story makes me want to embrace my inner Luddite. The fact that phone locations are routinely tracked and sold to third parties is only the tip of an enormous privacy-is-dead iceberg that continues on with Facebook freely giving access to our data to third parties and onto Google knowing everything that we do online based on its trackers like Google Analytics. It doesn’t matter how much I lock down the technology I use, I’ve been concerned for years; the last three years I’ve been as active as I can to keep as much of that control as possible.
Without discontinuing the use of a smartphone that doubles as a GPS device, which is all smartphones, I don’t know of a good solution for this.