Hill eyes phone-tracking policies

Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Joe Barton (R-TX), co-chairmen of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, sent letters to the four wireless providers, asking them to detail at length how they collect, use and store cell phone location data.

The letters follow a story in The New York Times this week that revealed the extent to which Deutsche Telekom – the German company that seeks to sell T-Mobile to AT&T – had stored data on the whereabouts of Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician. The Times discovered that Deutsche Telekom had tracked the German lawmaker's longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times over a six-month period. Cell phone providers typically track the location of a customer's iPhone, BlackBerry, Android or other device as a means of servicing calls with the closest cell towers. Experts told the Times that providers and phones perform similarly when users access their e-mail accounts. But the extent to which Deutsche Telekom had tracked Spitz has prompted Reps Markey and Barton to ask AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile to explain their own collection practices.