Sprint and T-Mobile said they were taking steps to crack down on the misuse of customer location data after an investigation this week found how easy it was for third parties to track the locations of customers.
The announcements were the second promise from carriers in the past year to crack down on data access, and came as lawmakers questioned carriers’ commitment to protecting sensitive information.
In a story published on Tuesday, Motherboard said it had successfully paid a bounty hunter $300 to track the location of a cellphone, providing nothing except the phone’s number. The bounty hunter, the publication reported, was able to track the phone through data from a third-party aggregator called Zumigo. That company provided access...