Joseph Cox

T-Mobile is investigating a forum post claiming to be selling a mountain of personal data. The forum post itself doesn't mention T-Mobile, but the seller told Vice they have obtained data related to over 100 million people, and that the data came from T-Mobile servers. On the underground forum the seller is asking for 6 bitcoin, around $270,000, for a subset of the data containing 30 million social security numbers and drivers licenses.

Avast, an antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world's biggest companies.

Comcast is lobbying lawmakers against plans to encrypt web traffic that would make it harder for internet service providers (ISPs) to determine your browsing history. The plan, which Google intends to implement soon, would enforce the encryption of DNS data made using Chrome, meaning the sites you visit. Privacy activists have praised Google's move. But ISPs are pushing back as part of a wider lobbying effort against encrypted DNS, according to a lobbying presentation.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter to major US telecommunications companies AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon urging them to lower the amount of sensitive data they store on customers. Those large pools of data present a significant hacking risk, Sen Wyden argued. "Your companies collectively hold deeply-sensitive information about hundreds of millions of Americans. It should come as no surprise that this data is a juicy target for foreign spies," he said.

Public interest groups and telecommunications experts filed a complaint with the Federal Communication Commission centering on how AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon sold their customers' real-time location data to third parties without those customers' informed consent. The complaint reads:

Federal Communications Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks say that the FCC has not been forthcoming about its investigation into the sale of consumers' real-time cell phone location data by AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. It appears the investigation has not been prioritized by the agency. Around a year after the inquiry was opened, there have been no public updates, and the two commissioners said they have little knowledge on what's actually being investigated. "So far it appears that the FCC is more interested in protecting the privacy of its investigation than

In response to questions from Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), T-Mobile has revealed another case of abuse, in which a “bad actor” acquired location information without consumer consent. “It is now abundantly clear that you have failed to be good stewards of your customers’ private location information,” Sen Wyden wrote in another letter March 13 addressed to all of the major telecoms. In the newly revealed incident, in Aug 2014, LocAid—a company that aggregated location data from the telecoms and then sold it onto other clients—informed T-Mobile it was suspending the account of a particular customer

Around 250 bounty hunters and related businesses had access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint customer location data, according to documents obtained by Vice. The documents also show that telecommunication companies sold data intended to be used by 911 operators and first responders to data aggregators, who sold it to bounty hunters. The data was in some cases so accurate that a user could be tracked to specific spots inside a building.

Earlier in Jan it was reported how T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint were selling cell phone users’ location data that ultimately ended up in the hands of bounty hunters and people unauthorized to handle it. That data trickled down from the telecommunications giants through a complex network of middlemen and data brokers. One of those third parties was Zumigo, a company that gets location data access directly from the telecom companies and then sells it for a profit.

For years tech companies have been getting free content moderation from journalists who have often been the ones unearthing illegal or problematic behaviour on huge platforms, with social networks only dealing with issues once they know that there’s an impending news article coming. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noted the role that journalists play in counteracting disinformation that spreads and is incentivized on his platform.