T-Mobile sells a little-known GPS service called SyncUP, which allows users who are parents to monitor the locations of their children. This week, an apparent glitch in the service’s system obscured the locations of users’ own children while sending them detailed information and the locations of other, random children.
404 Media first reported on the extremely creepy bug, which appears to have impacted a large number of users. The outlet notes an outpouring of consternation and concern from web users on social platforms like Reddit and X, many of which claimed to have been impacted. 404 also interviewed one specific user, “Jenna,” who explained her ordeal with the bug:
Jenna, a parent who uses SyncUP to keep track of her three-year-old and six-year-old children, logged in Tuesday and instead of seeing if her kids had left school yet, was shown the exact, real-time locations of eight random children around the country, but not the locations of her own kids. 404 Media agreed to use a pseudonym for Jenna to protect the privacy of her kids.
“I’m not comfortable giving my six-year-old a phone, but he takes a school bus and I just want to be able to see where he is in real time,” Jenna said. “I had put a 500 meter boundary around his school, so I get an alert when he’s leaving.”
Jenna sent 404 Media a series of screenshots that show her logged into the app, as well as the locations of children located in other states. In the screenshots, the address-level location of the children are available, as is their name and the last time the location was updated.
Even more alarmingly, the woman interviewed by 404 claims that the company didn’t show much concern for the bug. “Jenna” says she called the company and was referred to an employee who told her that a ticket had been filed in the system on the issue’s behalf. A follow-up email from the concerned mother produced no response, she said.
“As a mother, this is super alarming to me, and I raised flags right away [with T-Mobile] and nobody took me seriously there,” Jenna told the outlet. “I was probably shown more than eight children. I would log in and I couldn’t see my children but I could see a kid in California. I refreshed and then I had no trackers, and then I refreshed again and would see a different child.”
When reached for comment by Gizmodo, a T-Mobile spokesperson told us: “Yesterday we fully resolved a temporary system issue with our SyncUP products that resulted from a planned technology update. We are in the process of understanding potential impacts to a small number of customers and will reach out to any as needed. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
The privacy implications of such a glitch are obvious and not really worth extrapolating on. That said, it’s also a good reminder that the more digital access you give a company, the more potential there is for that access to fall into the wrong hands.
