San Francisco: The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) charges a fine of $200 million for major US mobile carriers for selling the location data of customers to agencies.
The Federal Communications Commission charged fines as the nation's four largest wireless carriers sold customers' location information without taking measures against unauthorised access. T-Mobile faces a fine of more than $91 million, AT&T faces about $57 million, Verizon $48 million and Sprint $12 million, the FCC said on Friday.
The Enforcement Bureau of FCC opened this investigation after reports surfaced that a Missouri Sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, used a "location-finding service" operated by Securus, a provider of communications services to correctional facilities, to access the location information of the wireless carriers' customers without their consent between 2014 and 2017.
FCC chairman says In America users take their wireless phones wherever they go, information about 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 the agencies don't do that.
The also added FCC will not tolerate phone companies putting Americans' privacy at risk.
The FCC also admonished these carriers for apparently disclosing their customers' location information, without their authorisation, to a third party.
The four major US carriers sold access to their customers' location information to "aggregators," who then resold access to such information to third-party location-based service providers (like Securus).
Although their exact practices varied, each carrier relied heavily on contract-based assurances that the location-based services providers would obtain consent from the wireless carrier's customer before accessing that customer's location information.
