How Phone Companies Share Your Data

Carriers get requests for their customers’ whereabouts from all sorts of places. How they handle them depends on who is asking. 1) Each carrier has a dedicated legal team that evaluates the requests of law-enforcement officers. 2) Emergency calls are routed to public-safety answering points, which can obtain the caller’s location without affirmative consent. 3) Middlemen like LocationSmart and Zumigo can access information on cellphone users’ whereabouts in situations where the company seeking the information might not know which carrier to ask. 4) Carriers also sell bulk data on groups of cellphone users to marketers.

Instead of asking carriers for data gleaned from cell-tower interactions, software companies get users to share their location through cellphone software that uses GPS and Wi-Fi signals to more accurately pinpoint customers. Carriers aren’t involved in this data sharing.