T-Mobile's new app requested data from a customer's phone every five seconds

Earlier today, we told you that for now, T-Mobile is keeping the new T-Life app and the old T-Mobile app as the latter remains available to help with the transition to the former app. And while both apps basically do the same things, a T-Mobile customer has made quite a shocking discovery. First, we need to point out that when this subscriber opened the T-Life app for the first time, he opted out of a request to share his data. But thanks to the Pi-hole ad blocker, he saw something unsettling.

The Pi-hole app discovered that the T-Life app was trying to send information from the subscriber's phone every five seconds to a website with the address "smetrics.t-mobile.com." While the T-Mobile customer said "It could be nothing, or it could be something," he decided to uninstall the T-Life app since he was using it only to pay his account each month. After discovering what could be a major privacy issue, the customer said that he would no longer pay via the app and plans on using the T-Mobile website to remit his monthly balance.

In addition to possibly being used to obtain information from its customers, the T-Mobile subscriber also points out that the constant requests for information in the background could be a drain on a phone's battery. Now we should point out that the reason that the info requests are being sent out every five seconds is probably because the customer opted out of a request to share his data and as a result, the app continually asks for the information to be sent.

One other T-Mobile subscriber says that, "If you agreed to the new terms after the most recent update, congratulations you are now being location tracked for the purposes of selling your information to advertisers." That is a possibility. However, another T-Mobile subscriber had a more benign reason why the T-Life app might be making these info requests. "The T-Mobile Tuesday app used to send back information about your cellular connection for diagnostic control, [trouble] shooting purposes… Looks like this is likely doing the same thing."

According to T-Mobile, the metrics collected by the carrier include: