The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit (see below) against mobile operator AT&T and two data brokers - LocationSmart and Zumigo - for selling AT&T customers' real-time location data without their consent. The lawsuit demands, apart from monetary damages, that AT&T stop selling any more customer location data and ensure that any already sold data is destroyed. It represents three AT&T customers based in California who were unaware that the company sold their location data, which they had not consented to. It also states that AT&T violated the Federal Communications Act by not properly protecting customers' real-time location data; and the California Unfair Competition Law and the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act for misleading its customers around the sale of such data. The lawsuit reads: “AT&T has knowingly breached its duties to protect Plaintiffs’ sensitive location data in order to profit from it.” "Defendants’ practices allow Plaintiffs and other AT&T customers to be tracked and targeted by unknown third parties without their knowledge. AT&T leverages the technology embedded within a customer’s phone and its own network infrastructure to locate its customers without any indication that AT&T is tracking them in order to sell their precise location to third parties for non-911 purposes." EFF's lawsuit against AT&T: points to several instances of abuse The lawsuit points to several instances of abuse of AT&T data: AT&T sold its data through a location aggregator to Securus in May 2018 according to a New York Times report. Low-level law enforcement then used Securus' tool…
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