FCC Fines Major U.S. Wireless Carriers for Selling Customer Location Data
Summary: The FCC fined AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon nearly $200 million total for illegally sharing customers' location data without consent, concluding a more than four-year investigation. The carriers sold access to aggregators who resold it to third-party location-based service providers, and the FCC found AT&T's data reached at least 88 third parties, Verizon's 67, Sprint's 86 and T-Mobile's 75.
Bottom line: The fines work out to roughly 62 cents per customer, and Verizon's $47 million penalty is less than one percent of its nearly $77 billion in 2023 wireless service revenue - a cost the carriers kept accruing by continuing to share data for 275 to 386 days after being told it was illegal.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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