• battlefield-13a_01battlefield-13a_02

  • Verizon To Put GPS Warning Labels On Phones

    Greg Kumparak

    Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California. → Learn More

    Friday, April 29th, 2011

    Your phone is probably tracking you, to some degree. We learned that much last week. Sure, the data likely isn’t being used in any nefarious way — and, unless some “bug” is secretly strapping an IP or a unique ID to the data, all the platform makers are promising the data is anonymized before it goes out.

    Whatever’s being done with the data, it’s likely to creep folks out. And when folks get creeped out, the lawsuits start pouring in.

    Looking to nip this issue in the bud before they get dragged too deep into it, Verizon has sent a letter to congress promising to put a removable warning label on the screens of “all new devices it sells”, informing users that the phone is capable of tracking their location and potentially associating that location with other customer data. What do you think: overkill, or just right?

    Tags: