Communications and Technology

WASHINGTON, DC – House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders today sent letters requesting information from six companies about the sale and misuse of cell phone geolocation data. The letters were sent to Zumingo, Microbilt, T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. The letters seek to increase transparency surrounding how U.S. wireless carriers and third parties are accessing, transferring, storing, and securing customer location information.

The letters come as recent media reports have indicated that Zumingo, a location aggregation firm, purchased geolocation data from T-Mobile and subsequently sold the data to...

Excerpt: “According to a recent Motherboard investigative report, nationwide wireless carriers may be continuing to sell American customers’ real-time location data and information to various third parties without customers’ knowledge and consent. According to the report, Zumigo, a location aggregation firm, purchased geolocation data from T-Mobile, and subsequently sold that data to Microbilt, a third party firm, which further disseminated the geolocation data to another company and intermediary. This practice of selling and sharing of location information through multiple entities potentially impacts hundreds of millions of American customers. We are...

WASHINGTON, DC – Energy and Commerce Committee Republican Leader Greg Walden (R-OR) today issued the following statement after announcing the subcommittee Republican Leaders for the 116th Congress.

"Republicans stand ready to work with our Democratic colleagues in the same bipartisan way by which the Energy and Commerce Committee delivered dozens of new laws tackling everything thing from opioids and safe drinking water, to reauthorizing the Federal Communications Commission and modernizing America’s Brownfields law in the last session of Congress," said the top Republican on the committee, Rep. Greg Walden. "The American...