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Verizon Says It Will Stop Selling Users' Location Data

An investigation revealed a third-party company was accessing Verizon customers' locations inappropriately.
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Verizon says it is going to stop selling its customers phone location data to third-party companies after an investigation revealed one of them was accessing the information inappropriately. 

Verizon announced the decision Tuesday in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden.

It follows a investigation by Wyden into the relationship between Verizon, two data vendors and those vendors' corporate customers. 

That probe revealed that officials at prison phone company Securus were tracking Verizon customers' locations without their consent for "activities wholly unrelated" to prison duties. 

Following the news, AT&T told Ars Technica, "We will be ending our work with aggregators for these services as soon as practical." And Sprint told the outlet it was "beginning the process of terminating its current contracts with" parties it shared data location services with.

T-Mobile said it would stop sharing location data with the prison phone company but didn't commit to stop sharing data with other companies.