Sprint turned over users data to authorities 8 million times last year |
Yes you read that correctly. Just in the last year alone, Sprint turned over users GPS data to authorities 8 million times. Now maybe that number turns out to be grossly inflated. Maybe it’s really 4 million times, or 1 million. Even if it’s under a thousand users, this news is scary.
There are legitimate reasons for law enforcement agencies to have access to location data. We could all understand the need when it comes to missing person cases, kidnappings and wanted fugitives. We all want lives to be saved. But there must be some guidelines, because this is truly scary stuff below:
[At the Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering conference] Sprint Nextel’s electronic surveillance manager Paul Taylor described an automated system that law enforcement could use to easily look up subscriber whereabouts.
It works like this. Law Enforcement can submit a request for a user’s location up to every three minutes, for a period of 60 days. That’s how you get the 8 million number.
Not scared enough? Hit the link to find out what other stuff Sprint knows about you and may be sharing.
TAGS: authorities, data, GPS, law enforcement, Sprint
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Who watches the watchmen? they do this all the time, surprised it got any media. They can do whatever they want.
Conor – I’m a Sprint representative and I wanted to properly characterize the “8 million” figure that Chris prominently featured in his blog and email.
The “8 million” figure does not represent the number of customers whose location information was provided to law enforcement, nor does it represent the instances or cases in which law enforcement contacted Sprint seeking customer location information.
Instead, the figure represents the number of individual automated requests, or “pings”, for specific location information, made to the Sprint network as part of a series of law enforcement investigations and public safety assistance requests during the past year. The critical point is that a single case or investigation may generate thousands of individual requests to the network as the law enforcement or public safety agency attempts to track or locate an individual over the course of days or weeks.
As a result, the 8 million automated requests or pings were generated by thousands (NOT millions) of instances in which law enforcement or public safety agencies sought customer location information. Several thousand instances over the course of a year should not be shocking given that we have 47 million customers and requests from law enforcement and public safety agencies are due to a variety of circumstances: exigent or emergency situations, criminal investigations, or cases where a Sprint customer consents to sharing location information (a car is stolen; the owner realizes their phone is in the car so they consent to have it tracked in order to recover the car.)
It’s also important to note that we comply with applicable state and federal laws in all of the instances where we fulfill a law enforcement or public safety request for location information.
Matt Sullivan
Sprint Nextel
Matthew.sullivan@sprint.com