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posted by martyb on Monday March 02 2020, @12:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the cost-of-doing-business dept.

FCC issues wrist-slap fines to carriers that sold your phone-location data:

The big four mobile carriers face fines of between $12 million and $91 million each for selling their customers' real-time location data to third-party data brokers without customer consent, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's office announced today.

These are "proposed" fines, meaning the carriers can dispute them and try to get them reduced or eliminated. The proposed fines are $91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon, and $12 million for Sprint. That's a total of $208 million.

The FCC announcement said the carriers' punishments are for "apparently selling access to their customers' location information without taking reasonable measures to protect against unauthorized access to that information." The FCC said it also "admonished these carriers for apparently disclosing their customers' location information, without their authorization, to a third party."

Pai said that the FCC has taken "strong enforcement action" with today's proposed fines. But the two Democrats on the Republican-majority commission said the fines are too low and criticized the Pai-led FCC for secrecy during the investigation.

"The FCC's investigation is a day late and a dollar short," Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. "The FCC kept consumers in the dark for nearly two years after we learned that wireless carriers were selling our location information to shady middlemen."

[...] Relative to the carriers' collective revenue, the fines are "a slap on the wrist amounting to less than one one-thousandth of their annual take," consumer-advocacy group Free Press said. Revenue in calendar year 2019 was $181.2 billion for AT&T; $131.9 billion for Verizon; $45 billion for T-Mobile; and $32.5 billion for Sprint.


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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday March 02 2020, @04:07PM

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Monday March 02 2020, @04:07PM (#965526) Homepage Journal

    My old boss who owned the company said to me "All I care about is money coming in and money going out".

    The question is, how much money did they make selling this information, and was the fine enough to make them never do it again?

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