News recently broke out that Sprint has been pining thousands of users for GPS information about 8 million times in 2009 and some of that information was sent to the federal government without users knowing.
This is pretty troubling news for a lot of Sprint users who may have been unaware of this going on. Cell phone company can activate GPS on any phone even if the user has it turned off. They have also provided the federal government with an application that allows them to type in any phone number and find exactly where that phone number is.
Hopefully for sprint that they will find a way to use PR to smooth this over before a class action lawsuit start happening to them. Below is a response from Sprint’s blog. No matter what they say when your doing something like this you need to at least let your customers knows something in plain sentences. It always comes out better that way.
I work for Sprint and have seen a number of people on Twitter, tweeting a link to a blog post about the amount of law enforcement requests we received in 2009 for customers’ GPS location info. The information on the blog is inaccurate. I wanted to take an opportunity to set the record straight and share Sprint’s official response.
I hope this helps and clarifies.
Rich Pesce
Social Media & Digital Communications
Sprint
Twitter: @rpesce
The comments made by a Sprint corporate security officer during a recent conference have been taken out of context by this blogger. Specifically, the “8 million” figure, which the blogger highlights in his email and blog post, has been grossly misrepresented. The figure does not represent the number of customers whose location information was provided to law enforcement, as this blogger suggests.
Instead, the figure represents the number of individual “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. It’s critical to note that a single case or investigation may generate thousands of individual pings to the network as the law enforcement or public safety agency attempts to track or locate an individual.
Instances where law enforcement agencies seek customer location information include exigent or emergency circumstances such as Amber Alert events, criminal investigations, or cases where a Sprint customer consents to sharing location information.
Sprint takes our customers’ privacy extremely seriously and all law enforcement and public safety requests for customer location information are processed in accordance with applicable state and federal laws.
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