Back in 2019, the major wireless carriers in the country were investigated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for sharing the location data of its customers without their consent. After years of investigating, the FCC has finally fined these companies for the practice.
Based on its investigation, the FCC deemed that the carriers sold “access to its customers’ location information to ‘aggregators.’” These were then resold to third-party location-based service providers, which gave bounty hunters, law enforcement agencies, and credit card companies access to this information. Even after the issue was raised to the FCC, the carriers continued the practice.
The fine implemented by the FCC varied on a number of factors. T-Mobile’s fine is at $80 million, followed by AT&T with $57 million. Verizon is third with $47 million. Lastly, Sprint faces a fine of $12 million.
A spokesperson for AT&T said that this action by the FCC “lacks both legal and factual merit. It unfairly holds us responsible for another company’s violation of our contractual requirements to obtain consent, ignores the immediate steps we took to address that company’s failures, and perversely punishes us for supporting life-saving location services like emergency medical alerts and roadside assistance that the FCC itself previously encouraged. We expect to appeal the order after conducting a legal review.”
Source: The Verge
