Newsletter 
Summary: Recently, a glitch in T-Mobile’s tracking systems exposed the names, photos, and real-time locations of children to strangers. Furthermore, a similar bug affected the telecom operator’s car tracking service, providing other people’s vehicles and data. T-Mobile announced that it has resolved the issue caused by a system update.
On Tuesday, some T-Mobile subscribers lost the ability to track the location of their kids using the company’s SyncUP device. Instead, the system displayed real-time locations and other details of random children across the country. It appears that a glitch in T-Mobile’s location tracking systems exposed the location data of kids to strangers.
A glitch in T-Mobile’s tracking systems exposed the location of children
T-Mobile offers a GPS tracker for parents called the SyncUP KIDS. They can use it to track the real-time location of kids who don’t have smartphones yet. However, in a bizarre turn of events, many parents who use SyncUP were not able to see the location of their kids on Tuesday. Instead, the service started showing the real-time location, names, and photos of random children across the country.
According to the media reports, several T-Mobile SyncUP GPS tracker users received information about the kids from another tracker, not their own. The issue affected users of the T-Mobile SyncUP KIDS tracking service. Some parents reported that refreshing the app would just show the details of new random children.
T-Mobile has acknowledged that a bug allowed unauthorized users to view other people’s children’s real-time location or details. “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”, said a T-Mobile spokesperson.
A similar glitch also affected T-Mobile’s SyncUP DRIVE service
In addition to the T-Mobile SyncUP KIDS, a similar glitch also impacted the smartphone carrier’s SyncUP DRIVE service. A bug in the system update started causing the service’s accompanying app to display the location of other people’s cars. It allows users to track the location of their cars in real time, apart from getting some performance metrics. However, several users complained that the app is showing the location of vehicles that are not on their account.
“It’s showing me data from all kinds of random cars across the USA. But it won’t show me the data from my vehicles”, a T-Mobile user wrote in a post on Reddit.
As of now, we still don’t know the extent of the problem or how many customers T-Mobile’s tracking systems glitch affected. Fortunately, the company has fixed the issue for the SyncUP DRIVE users as well.