FCC fines AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile $200M for selling customer location data

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Friday proposed fines against the nation's largest cellular carriers for selling access to real-time consumer geolocation data to third-party aggregators.

In total, the FCC proposes (PDF link) AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile be slapped with more than $200 million in penalties for "apparently" disclosing user location information to a third party without customer authorization.

T-Mobile faces the highest penalty with a proposed fine of more than $91 million. AT&T and Verizon face proposed fines of more than $57 million and $48 million, respectively, while Sprint faces a proposed fine of more than $12 million.

"American consumers take their wireless phones with them wherever they go. And information about a wireless customer's location is highly personal and sensitive. The FCC has long had clear rules on the books requiring all phone companies to protect their customers' personal information. And since 2007, these companies have been on notice that they must take reasonable precautions to safeguard this data and that the FCC will take strong enforcement action if they don't. Today, we do just that," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement.

In January, Pai said "one or more" U.S. carriers might be fined over illegal data practices after an investigation by the FCC's Enforcement Bureau found certain companies "apparently violated" federal law.

The data selling practices were unearthed in a series of reports in 2018. Each of the four telecoms were found to sell access to customer location information to aggregators, who in turn sold that data to law enforcement agencies, bounty hunters, tracking services and alleged stalkers, among others.

Verizon promised to end its data selling program in November 2018, a move followed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint in 2019. A subsequent drawdown took months, with all carriers cutting off the tap to aggregators in May 2019.

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16 Comments

seanismorris 1624 comments · 8 Years

About 4 years ago

Shame... T-mobile was such and good company, now they’re sprinting towards the dumpster.

mac_dog 1069 comments · 16 Years

How much of this am I entitled to?

Panamaniak 41 comments · 5 Years

AppleInsider said:

In January, Pai said "one or more" U.S. carriers might be fined over illegal data practices after an investigation by the FCC's Enforcement Bureau found certain companies "apparently violated" federal law.

Funny, if I violated Federal Law, I’d get an all expense paid trip to the Pen for a large chunk of my life. These corporations instead just get a 0.1% of their “salary” garnished... it’s like if I made $100k last year and got fined $100 for committing a “federal offense” that allowed me to make the $100k to begin with. I’d call that a work expense (hardly, at that) and just keep doing it every year. What an F-ing joke this all has become...

cornchip 1941 comments · 11 Years

Panamaniak said:

AppleInsider said:

In January, Pai said "one or more" U.S. carriers might be fined over illegal data practices after an investigation by the FCC's Enforcement Bureau found certain companies "apparently violated" federal law.

Funny, if I violated Federal Law, I’d get an all expense paid trip to the Pen for a large chunk of my life. These corporations instead just get a 0.1% of their “salary” garnished... it’s like if I made $100k last year and got fined $100 for committing a “federal offense” that allowed me to make the $100k to begin with. I’d call that a work expense (hardly, at that) and just keep doing it every year. What an F-ing joke this all has become...

This just needs to be repeated...

ecarlseen 39 comments · 9 Years

mac_dog said:

How much of this am I entitled to?

None. How would it benefit government bureaucrats to give you money? Remember when Wells Fargo defrauded millions of customers by signing them up for services they didn't want or request? The government took $187M for themselves, and order $5M in restitution to the defrauded customers (about two dollars each). They don't care about you. They don't really even care about the corporate malfeasance (if they did, the fines would be meaningful). They just care about excuses to take money from whomever they can, with as little effort as possible. So they keep the numbers low enough that the corporations can shrug it off as a cost of doing business, consumers get screwed, and the cushy government jobs and pensions are protected. All of the important people win. Sorry that doesn't include you (or me).