News came out on wired.com just recently about Sprint sharing customer locations with law enforcement. Before you worry and throw your Pre in the ocean here are the situations where Sprint may ‘ping’your phone for GPS data:
- under the authority of a court order
- you’ve made a 911 call
- an emergency situation (such as tracking someone lost in the wilderness or trying to locate an abducted child or hostage)
- with your consent
Apparently Sprint shared 8 millions GPS pings with law agencies but a ping is every 3 minutes for 60 days (if a court ordered it) so that 8 million figure maybe misleading. What’s worrying is that Sprint has setup a web portal for such court orders where officials can enter a phone number to be pinged. We wonder how safe that portal is? Hmmmm.
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