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from the even-a-stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day dept.
According to a letter to congress from Ajit V. Pai, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC), carriers broke federal law by selling customer location data. Pai intends to followup with "Notice(s) of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture."
The Federal Communications Commission's enforcement bureau has determined that "one or more" wireless carriers' practices for handling location data violated the law, Chairman Ajit Pai told Congress Friday.
The sales of location data by major telecommunication carriers was highlighted the past few years in a series of Motherboard stories which exposed the widespread practice.
All four major U.S. carriers have said they no longer sell location data.
Potential FCC fines aren't the only fallout from the revelations. The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation is also suing AT&T for allegedly violating the Federal Communications Act.
That law requires telecoms to preserve confidentiality of "customer proprietary network information" -- including location data they obtain via their role as carriers.
The digital rights organization is seeking a court order prohibiting AT&T from sharing their location data.
AT&T argues that "the lawsuit should be dismissed, [since they] stopped providing geolocation data to aggregators"
It will be interesting to see if that line of legal reasoning works for them.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 03 2020, @04:52PM
Same old Ma Bell. AT&T was broken up in 1984, but like some regenerative, bottom feeding, slimy sea creature, has managed to reconstitute and regrow itself.
In the mid 1970s, my father returned from a business trip to Canada with some contraband not available in the US: an extra long cord for a phone handset (gasp!). You could actually move around a bit while holding the handset! AT&T was pretty insistent that you couldn't have any extras whatsoever, unless you paid them more money every month. Tone dialing with a dial pad was an upgrade over pulse dialing with a rotary dial, and of course they charged more for that. I also remember the faint ringer check they often did around 1AM, to detect how many extensions you had plugged into the phone line. Needed a phone with a switch to turn the ringer off to dodge that check. Their greed and controlling ways is also why we ever had 110 baud acoustic modems.