Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too

Do you use Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile? If so, your real-time cell phone location data may have been shared with law enforcement without your knowledge or consent.

According to a report by the New York Times (May 10, 2018) a Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too.

Thousands of jails and prisons across the United States use a company called Securus Technologies to provide and monitor calls to inmates. But the former sheriff of Mississippi County, Mo., used a lesser-known Securus service to track people’s cellphones, including those of other officers, without court orders, according to charges filed against him in state and federal court.

The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.

As location tracking has become more accurate, and as more people carry their phones at every waking moment, the ability of law enforcement officers and companies like Securus to get that data has become an ever greater privacy concern.
--
Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon whose work often focuses on tech and privacy, sent a letter to the FCC this week demanding an investigation into why a company, contracted to monitor calls of prison inmates, also allows police to track phones of anyone in the US without a warrant.

The bombshell story in The New York Times revealed Securus, a Texas-based prison technology company, could track any phone "within seconds" by obtaining data from cellular giants -- including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon -- typically reserved for marketers.

Wyden said the system allows police and government employees to conduct unauthorized and warrantless surveillance, and it "needlessly exposes millions of Americans to potential abuse and surveillance by the government." (ZDNet, May 11, 2018)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also commented on the claim that "Securus Improperly Collects Data and Shares it with Law Enforcement".

"Securus is one of the largest providers of telephone services to jails and prisons throughout the country and its technology enables inmates to make collect and prepaid calls to others outside of the facility - at outrageous, unnecessarily high prices. As part of that provision of service, Securus collects location information on everyone called by a prisoner. Securus has used its ability to collect this information to build an online portal that allows law enforcement to obtain the real-time location data of any customer of the country’s major cellphone carriers - not just people who call or receive calls from a prisoner. Worse, Securus doesn’t even check whether law enforcement requestors actually have legal authority to access the data in the first place, before sharing this private location information."