Cellphone Carriers May Face $200 Million in Fines for Selling Location Data

But the companies did not always obey those contracts and the carriers had little way of enforcing them, allowing troves of personal information to be used in ways consumers had never intended. The F.C.C. found that the cellphone companies had broken federal law by being negligent with the data.

After the 2018 article and questions from lawmakers, the carriers pledged publicly to limit sales of the data, saying they would wind down their existing contracts with location aggregators. But a report in 2019 showed the data was still available to bounty hunters and others.

Later that year, the companies said in response to questions from an F.C.C. commissioner that they had stopped the practice.

The continued sale of data was the impetus behind the penalties, which amount to tens of millions of dollars for each carrier, people familiar with the matter said. The F.C.C. is fining companies based on the number of days the practice carried on.

“I am committed to ensuring that all entities subject to our jurisdiction comply” with the law and the F.C.C.’s rules, Mr. Pai said in his letter to lawmakers.

But the time between the initial 2018 report and the proposed penalties, and the expected size of the fines, has raised the ire of privacy hawks. One Democratic commissioner, Geoffrey Starks, wrote an opinion piece in The Times last year complaining that “nearly a year after the news first broke, the commission has yet to issue an enforcement action or fine those responsible.”

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who first raised concerns about the data sharing and has repeatedly questioned the companies and the F.C.C. over the issue, said in a statement on Thursday that the chairman “only investigated after public pressure mounted.”

He said the fines were “comically inadequate” to deter future privacy violations.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/technology/fcc-location-data.html