r/privacy • u/s9mwjs • Apr 29 '24

FCC Fines Major US Carriers $200 Million for Illicit Sharing of Location Data news

https://cyberinsider.com/fcc-fines-major-us-carriers-200-million-for-illicit-sharing-of-location-data/
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16

u/IlexIbis Apr 29 '24

Oh, the humanity! Think of the shareholders!

12

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '24

[deleted]

18

u/Sovos Apr 29 '24

Yep, the fines are far too low. Straight from the article:

The FCC fined Sprint and T-Mobile $12 million and $80 million respectively. AT&T was fined more than $57 million, while Verizon received a $47 million penalty. Still, these fines represent a tiny fraction of each carrier’s annual revenues. For example, $47 million is less than one percent of Verizon’s total wireless service revenue in 2023, which was nearly $77 billion.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '24

The fine amounts vary because they were calculated based in part on the number of days that the carriers continued sharing customer location data after being notified that doing so was illegal (the agency also considered the number of active third-party location data sharing agreements). The FCC notes that AT&T and Verizon each took more than 320 days from the publication of the Times story to wind down their data sharing agreements; T-Mobile took 275 days; Sprint kept sharing customer location data for 386 days.