On April 30th, according to overseas reports, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States announced today that AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint/T-Mobile have been fined a total of $196 million (approximately 1.425 billion RMB).
The penalty was imposed for illegally selling access to customer location information without their consent.
Sprint and T-Mobile (now merged as T-Mobile) were fined $12 million and $80 million respectively. Verizon was fined nearly $47 million, while AT&T faced a penalty of over $57 million.
The fines varied based on the duration each carrier sold access to customer location information without safeguards and the number of entities that obtained access.
FCC began investigating the U.S. Big Four carriers in 2019 after they were found selling real-time location information from customer devices to third parties, leading to the resale of this data to private investigators, bounty hunters, law enforcement agencies, credit card companies, and others.
Following the investigation, FCC confirmed that the sharing of consumer location data by the Big Four carriers violated federal law.
