T-Mobile Hit With Court Order Over Scraping Data From AT&T

There’s a difference between taking what’s public knowledge and using it to your advantage and taking private information and using it to gain an upper hand. Unfortunately, T-Mobile got caught with its hand in the cookie jar. A federal judge has recently issued a restraining order against T-Mobile, effectively preventing the carrier from scraping customer data from AT&T’s website.

T-Mobile restrained from scraping data from AT&T

The competition between carriers in the US is stiff. There are effectively three major carriers in the country: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. All of them are vying for the same pie, so obviously they all need an edge to beat out the competition. With T-Mobile, it seems that the carrier tried to gain the upper hand by scraping data from AT&T.

If T-Mobile had based its strategy on publicly shared or published pricing, like from AT&T advertisements or its public website, that would have been fine. However, it seems that T-Mobile got its information from password-protected sections of AT&T’s website. This means that this is data T-Mobile should never have gotten its hands on in the first place.

Now, it seems that a federal judge agrees with AT&T. So much so that T-Mobile has been issued a restraining order, effectively stopping it from continuing to do what it has been doing. US District Judge Karen Gren Scholer conceded that AT&T might suffer harm if T-Mobile were allowed to continue.

What actually happened?

For those unfamiliar, T-Mobile offers its customers access to its Easy Switch tool. This tool allows customers to compare their current plans against those of T-Mobile. If T-Mobile has lower prices or better perks, these customers can switch carriers in minutes, assuming they have an unlocked and eSIM-compatible device.

But how does T-Mobile compare their plans against the competition? According to AT&T, the Easy Switch tool asks customers to enter their login credentials. From there, T-Mobile’s tool will deploy a bot to scrape the customer’s data. Like we said, this is information that T-Mobile would not be able to access normally.

In any case, like we said, competition is stiff among carriers. So, carriers employing all kinds of tactics and strategies to gain an advantage is to be expected. However, in T-Mobile’s case, it might have been borderline illegal.

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