A Location-Sharing Disaster Shows How Exposed You Really Are | WIRED

Also see The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica (Slate)

"You couldn’t hope for a much better encapsulation of the hopeless state of data privacy in the US today. You can see the same casual security sloppiness with which LocationSmart and Securus treated your location in the countless exposed databases—revealing everything from personal information to voter records—or in the extremely, entirely, embarrassingly preventable Equifax breach. The same system that allows AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint to sell your location to companies you’ve never heard of also allows thousands of barely regulated, shadowy data brokers to know everything about not just where you are but who you are, and what you do online. And lack of tangible progress, the sense that this has all happened before and will happen again, the resignation; that’s the cumulative effect of years of breaches and leaks and carelessness that make this all feel so futile. This keeps happening, and keeps not getting fixed."

A Location-Sharing Disaster Shows How Exposed You Really Are | WIRED