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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

No, unaggregated, real-time data is available. It percolated all the way down to bounty hunters before it really came to public knowledge.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunte...

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"Your wireless device can determine its (and your) physical, geographical location (“Location Based Services” or LBS) and can associate your device’s physical location with other data. You have the ability to enable or disable access to such services. By enabling location settings on your device, you are permitting applications on your device to use LBS through software, widgets or peripheral components you choose to download, add or attach to your wireless device or through web access, messaging capabilities or other means, and you are authorizing Verizon Wireless to collect, use and disclose your Location Information as appropriate to provide you with any location services that you enabled. To limit potential unauthorized access to your Location Information, Verizon Wireless offers various mechanisms and settings to manage access to location data. You should review each application’s settings to determine whether you want to enable LBS for that application." [1]

From 2018. The wording says "as appropriate" to provide you with services. I'm not seeing anything here about collecting your location to resell. Does anyone have an explicit wording in a contract they can refer me to?

[1] https://www.verizonwireless.com/dam/support/pdf/collateral/C...

That just limits it for apps on your device, Verizon collects and does whatever they want with it regardless of what you tell them to or what settings you pick on your device since they create it first in their servers and then send the data to your phone.

That's not exactly true. The phone has GPS, which is precise location data, and independent of cellular service.

The carrier only has tower triangulation, which is less accurate but still valuable.

I believe carriers also have access to your GPS location because it’s mandated by law in order for emergency services to locate you.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/j575dg/what-a-gps-data-is-an...

I didn't know about that. It seems like there is much less public attention on what these companies are doing compared to tech companies.

Because tech companies are still relatively ethical, you wouldn't have so many leaks otherwise.

Agreed, a lot of tech might be data harvesters, but they don't sell location data to bounty hunters.

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