News Update – 200 Million Dollar Location Tracking

Speaker 1: This opening story and news update is about $200,000,000 in federal fines, and it starts with a Missouri sheriff named Corey Hutchison. Back in 2014, Mississippi County, Missouri, right in the boot heel of the state, the county started contracting out its prison phone system to a company called Securus. Prison phones are lucrative business, but the competition is really fierce, so these companies bundle other services in to try and make their offerings more compelling to law enforcement. One service Securus offered was a location tracking service that essentially allowed law enforcement to find the whereabouts of almost any cell phone in the country within seconds. By going through this system, it's typically used by marketers to get location data from major cell phone carriers. Mobile carriers know where you are based on cell tower triangulation and they're allowed to sell that data to businesses that want to market to you based on location. As long as, and this is really important, they get your consent. The only other way you can track someone's location legally is if you're law enforcement and you have court documents like a warrant. So what happened was this company Securus made a deal with cell phone carriers to buy that location data, which they would provide to law enforcement for a fee as long as law enforcement uploaded those court documents, which is where Corey Hutchison shows up. Because according to prosecutors, between 2014 and 2017, Corey tracked hundreds of people without their consent. While he plead guilty to one count each of identity theft and wire fraud, he was originally charged with nearly 30, which even then pales to witness testimony from another sergeant that said that Hutchison personally tracked him 64 times, 24 in a single day. All in, Sheriff Hutchison applied for thousands of searches and illegally accessed hundreds of people's information according to prosecutors. And if you're wondering, hey, I thought law enforcement had to upload a warrant to get this info. This is how we get to those fines. Mobile carriers are legally responsible for the safety of your personal information. When they license it to a company like Securus, it's the carriers that are responsible for making sure that Securus isn't giving out that info to anyone they're not supposed to. So when, instead of warrants, Sergeant Hutchison uploaded completely irrelevant documents including his health insurance policy, his auto insurance policy, and pages from the sheriff's training manual, Securus should not have given him that private information. But they did. And since the telecoms gave it to them, we arrive here. Where last week, the FCC proposed 200,000,000 in fines to the telecommunications companies for failing to secure their data. We're gonna talk a little bit more about what that means on this hacked news update. We're not

Speaker 2: even gonna talk about the FCC fines that long. It's gonna get real exciting.

Speaker 1: Oh, you have my attention. Fire it up. Take me through this fine.

Speaker 2: Sure. So the cell companies, the telcos, know where you are roughly based on what tower you're connected to, and they have the ability to sell that data, and they do.

Speaker 1: Who do they sell it to?

Speaker 2: Well, they sell it to a variety of people. You know, this one is they've sold it to a third party who then resells it to, you know, marketing companies and or, you know, law enforcement.

Speaker 1: Say we were hypothetically markers.

Speaker 2: Hypothetically. Hypothetically.

Speaker 1: What utility does that information have? Me knowing where someone's cell phone is. I'm trying to advertise to them. Why is that useful?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the this this form of data is not actually that great because this form of data is just literally which tower they're connected to. So it's a rough kind of proximity. But it's very valuable in the sense of, you know, being able to deliver an ad that's geotargeted, which is kind of like a very basic premise of, like, you know, online digital advertising.

Speaker 1: Right. So I'm a marketer. I wanna be able to say someone just walked into a smoothie shop. I'm gonna, with their consent, deliver them an advertisement for smoothies.

Speaker 2: You, in that statement, are assuming that knowing which cell tower they're connected to will tell you that they're in the smoothie shop, but it doesn't mean you can't get that data.

Speaker 1: How do you get that data?

Speaker 2: So this isn't really having anything to do with this fine, but it's more of just like a public service podcast, I think. But most of the apps that you have on your phone, when they ask you for your location data, whether they can have it always or just when you're in the app, they often resell that data, which is pinpoint accuracy of where you are. And they resell that to marketing companies.

Speaker 1: Do they need so I know in this story, the telecommunications companies, when they sell it to a third party who's gonna do something with it, that third party is responsible, in a contract with the telcos for getting your consent. Is an app saying, hey, we use your location data. Does that qualify consent in the same kind of legal sense?

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it'll be in the terms of service. So you passively, tacitly accept their conditions?

Speaker 1: Out of curiosity, this situation, they know where your location is based on which cell phone tower they're connected to.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 1: When I do it in an app, is it just GPS coordinates?

Speaker 2: Very much so.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So

Speaker 2: it's vastly more accurate. So so, like, the being people that theoretically work in marketing, we if you just Google, like, everybody should just open a web browser and Google, location based advertising. We can literally draw a geofence around the coffee shop at the end of the block and just deliver ads to people that are sitting in that coffee shop. And no one's ever accepted a condition to have their pinpoint location given out.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. It's sort of a side effect of just using the apps that we all use on a daily basis to exist in the world.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's major apps too. It's not just, like, you know, grungy third party Android apps. We're talking about, you know, premium media company apps that gather location data and resell it back to people.

Speaker 1: So there's a myriad of different ways that my location can be sold off as data to some third party. Can they figure out that it's me, or do they just know that there's a person going to these places?

Speaker 2: Yeah. They could figure it out. How? Because everyone's tracking everything these days through location pixels, tracking pixels, tracking you know, all this variety of digital tracking methods that we've added. You know, it used to be primitive cookies, and now we have this much more intensive suite of tools to do this. And the same thing with location data, your device has a unique ID. So, eventually, they can pair your device ID to other tracking pixels, which allows them to tag you with, you know, geographic, demographic, and psychographic data that they're pulling from your other social media platforms. So it's

Speaker 1: kind of about cross referencing. It's about the fact that they know this device was here, and then they know that that device went to this site that had this tracking pixel, and they're able to kind of create this sort of, like, mesh by which they reverse engineer, like, kind of your habits and traffic, which they're able to commodify and sell off to

Speaker 2: other people. Yeah. Right. So, like, say, you know, in the location based advertising game, say, you know, we're a major coffee franchise, and we really wanna target people that have, you know when they're in our shop, we wanna present them with this offer. And if they're of this psychographic makeup, that's really possible. You know, we've willingly torn down all the walls of our privacy in in certain ways.

Speaker 1: Inherent to this whole discussion, there's this idea that being a company that has this information about you is a privileged position. It's sensitive information and this proposed FCC fine is a result of the fact that the, cell phone companies behaved in a way they treated the information very cavalierly. They gave it out to someone who had not, checked all the boxes and was giving out to people that shouldn't have access to it at all. That's with the cell phone companies. This other thing we're talking about, where you're able to be tracked based on kind of GPS data through, mobile movement and websites, do you happen to know if there have been any giant law lawsuits about that?

Speaker 2: I don't think so. You know, there's definitely been no curtailing of that industry. It's only growing and expanding. And sorry for kinda hijacking this from about talking about the FCC fine and stuff, but I feel like this is the natural progression of that conversation.

Speaker 1: Sure. No. It makes sense to me.

Speaker 2: Like, cell towers seem so blase when you can, you know, know that Jordan goes into this Starbucks at this time every day.

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Speaker 1: T Mobile, which is one of the biggest Yeah. Proposed fine recipients, I think it was, like, 91,000,000 for them. I think they had 2018 revenue of 43,000,000,000 and, like, a net income of 2,800,000,000.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: So So this is a slap on the wrist. This is a symbolic gesture from the FCC saying, hey, we had rules in place. We actually got rid of a lot of those rules over the last three years, and you still managed to find a way to break them. This is a symbolic Sure. Nod that doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. Does this kinda just fall on consumers at this point if they wanna keep this data private? Because it doesn't seem like there's a lot of teeth with which to control these companies. Is it really just on you to lock down your data if that's something you care about?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think the you know, I think the reason this is a slap on the wrist is because it's old now. There's better ways to do this that are more accurate that we've kind of tacitly agreed to. Society is kind of tacitly agreeing to this, like, move through it, giving up tons of our privacy. And we all seem to be tacitly okay with it. And I think that that's like, I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat running around saying that everything's broken and that the world's burning, even though it kind of is. But the reality is is that, you know, we don't take it seriously. Like, I have location based turned off on my phone, but most people don't. No.

Speaker 1: So It's interesting to me that the cell phone carriers at this point like, if we think of, like, the value of these different types of information, the really granular stuff, you're in a coffee shop.

Speaker 2: Not in in this exact coffee shop.

Speaker 1: Is worth more than you're in this general geographic area. It seems interesting that the cell companies have had to resort to selling to, certain types of law enforcement where it's like, no. We don't need your consent because we're not marketing to you. We're trying to track, like, a criminal. Like, it's the quality of the information isn't that good, so they're having to find new customers to sell it to.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Then the thing is is, like, since this case began, like, 2014 to 2017, I think, like, location based advertising. Like, as people that theoretically work in marketing, we get calls from vendors that wanna sell us this service and have had those calls coming in since probably 2015, 2014. So I you know, what they were doing, sure, terrible. The fact that somebody exploited it, terrible. But the fact that it's constantly exploited every day by other people, we tacitly accept.

Speaker 1: We seem to be okay with it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you know, there's even, like, set up a new laptop the other day, and it asked asked me if I was okay with a unique advertiser ID to track me as a person and what I psychographically wanted to see so that the ads that serve me would be, you know, more refined to my tastes. And this is the same thing. It's the exact same thing, except it's happening on our phone. And when you install that, like, sports news app that everybody has on their phone, they're also just selling your location data constantly if you let them access it.

Speaker 1: The reason this whole story broke, the reason the FCC got interested was because the New York Times, I think, wrote a story about Securus. And the whole Securus story turns on the fact that there was one guy who was manipulating this, and we could all wrap our heads around that. We could picture one guy sitting in a computer looking at something he shouldn't have because he had privileged access to information that he had no right getting access to. There's this trickle down effect of corporate. I don't I don't know what. Maybe no one just kind of paying enough attention. It's interesting that that's what it takes to get people to pay attention, specifically to have there be a legal response to it. A whole bunch of media attention, has to get pointed like a spotlight on one of these things before there's gonna be any kind of a response.

Speaker 2: Well, I think that that day is coming for location based advertising. Like, it's just so effective. Like, if you imagine it, like, I'll we'll tell the tell the scenario of this that people will like. You know, imagine we run the independent coffee shop on the block, and there's a Starbucks on the corner. And we geofence the Starbucks and run shop local ads to everybody that goes there to try and drive them to the independent coffee shop. But in reality, the opposite is happening where they're, you know, selling Starbucks ads to the independent, but whatever. But the the gist of it is is is it it's very effective, but at the same time, it's I don't know. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Water boiling and the frog not realizing it Totally. Kind of situation. Yeah. Thanks for listening to this hacked update. If you like the show, write and subscribe, or check us out at patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Find us everywhere at hackedpodcast. Talk to you next week.

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