An interesting read over at “Slight Paranoia”. It seems that over the course of 13 months, law enforcement agencies have generated 8 million geolocation traces from Sprint.
What does that mean? Sprint has approximately 50 million subscribers. During the course of 13 months, law enforcement accessed a LEO only portal page to query the location of specific subscribers (presumably based on a phone number). Sprint tracks this information as a matter of course, by tracking a subscribers cell phone location.
Within 13 months, we can say that there are 395 days. Therefore LEOs are querying the site an average of 20,253 times a day. That is beucoup queries, and that is only for one provider. Using 20K a day and limiting this to 3 major providers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon) that’s approximately 60K queries daily.
That is a lot of tracking taking place. The thesis actually has a great deal of other information, and interesting facts. The thing that really boggled my mind was the numbers that we are talking about.
