On Tuesday, some parents lost the ability to track the locations of their children using a T-Mobile tracking device and app and instead were shown the exact locations of random other children around the country, 404 Media has learned.
T-Mobile sells a small GPS tracker for parents called SyncUP, which they can use to track the locations of young children who don’t have cell phones yet. 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. In many cases, the location updated time said “just now” or “one minute ago.” It is clear the tracked people are children because their profile pictures show images of young kids wearing backpacks, and many of the locations shown are schools around the country.
“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 said. “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.”
Jenna called T-Mobile support April 1 and shared part of the audio with 404 Media. In the audio, a T-Mobile employee said they filed a ticket but had no information about what happened. “We are now aware of the problem and we’re trying to find a way to fix the problem,” they say. “I’ve asked what we can do to see your kids’ SyncUp trackers because you can’t see your own kids’ trackers but somebody else’s. We’ll just need to wait for a little bit.”
Jenna also emailed T-Mobile and asked what happened but has not heard back. A request for comment was acknowledged by T-Mobile but it did not immediately provide one.
Jenna is not alone. On Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, parents say that they were also shown the locations of random people instead of their children or partners. T-Mobile also offers a device called SyncUp DRIVE, which is a dedicated car tracking device. In a Reddit thread called “SyncUp sharing locations of other users,” several posters said that they were being shown other people’s locations on their SyncUp DRIVE. “Never have I ever seen this,” one post says. “I went to check on a vehicle location and someone else’s car is on my account. I closed it and checked again. A new person’s car shows up. Nowhere does it show the devices on our account and it just pulling other cars and placing them there. The more I play with this, the more it seems to be a serious issue with TMO. There is no account hack or anything else. Every time I open the app, I get a different person’s vehicle.”
Another poster said that the app “keeps randomly adding and removing cars that aren’t my own.” A third said “same thing happening to me. Random cars, random locations.”
One Redditor told 404 Media “I could see other people’s vehicles listed and get the info on each. The vehicles listed changed every time I checked the app. I reached out to tforce on Twitter and was told they would escalate the issue. Shortly after the app started correctly only showing my vehicles.”
“Yall need to figure out your systems because I should not be able to see other peoples children on my syncup locations and not be able to see MY OWN CHILD,” one Twitter user said. “I’m getting locations for kids idk from different states but can’t get my sons location.” Another person on Twitter wrote “I have 3 kids with watches. No visibility to them today though T-Life app. However, another person could see one of my children. They called the principal at her school to let her know. I spoke with this person and found out she had access to 20 people.”
What happened with SyncUp is reminiscent of a bug that happened with Ubiquiti home surveillance cameras in December 2023, when some users logged into their apps and were being shown live footage from other people’s cameras.
An inherent risk with any type of app that allows users to track or spy on their kids or spouse is that once this data exists it can be leaked or hacked by bad actors. For years, we’ve reported on this exact thing happening, including a case in 2018 where an app that sells spyware to parents left the pictures of hundreds of monitored children online.
T-Mobile announced last month that some of its older SyncUp DRIVE devices would lose many features. Jenna told 404 Media that this morning she was again correctly showed the locations of her children.
