Carrier sales of phone-location data is illegal, FCC plans punishment

Presumably this only happened because the :<p>&gt; lawmakers in November accused[1] the FCC of failing to protect consumers’ privacy, and said that major wireless carriers were disclosing real-time location to data compilers without consumers’ consent or knowledge. The information could be obtained by companies including bounty hunters, the lawmakers said in a letter.<p>&gt; [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energycommerce.house.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;democrats.energycommerce.house.gov&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;FCC.2019.11.8.%20Letter%20re%20Location%20Privacy.CAT_.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energycommerce.house.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;democrats.energycomme...</a><p>&gt; -- as reported by Bloomburg<p>&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2020-01-31&#x2F;wireless-carriers-violated-privacy-by-sharing-location-fcc-says" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2020-01-31&#x2F;wireless-...</a><p>The FCC really has become just a lobbying goat under Pai. Yikes.

Biggest industry affected is the banks. They’ll ping your phone location if you make out of area purchases as a part of fraud detection. If your bank doesn’t require travel notices, they are probably pulling mobile location. Some don’t, I know chase uses mobile app to determine location.

I note that only REAL TIME location data is illegal, if I want to do most marketing things data from several days ago is perfectly usable.

Are there even laws anymore? It seems like the law only applies to non-corporate entities and citizens. If you&#x27;re in politics, law enforcement, or the Fortune 500, expect zero consequences for breaking the law. Exceptions exist but aren&#x27;t the rule.

So it&#x27;s okay for the carriers to provide the phone-location (and other metadata) to government entities without a warrant, but it&#x27;s not okay to sell it commercially? I&#x27;d love to see a legal analysis of that argument.

I&#x27;m sure the same precedent will apply for telecoms injecting ads, right?

I bet someone bought location data for legislators and showed it to them.

Why is it legal for them to collect that data in the first place? Can&#x27;t sell, abuse, or accidentally leak that which you don&#x27;t have.

What firms were sourcing this information?

The problem is that many private companies now have the historic data. Even if they don’t receive any more in the future, most people only ever go 3-5 places. Collect data for a few years and you have the majority of the population’s locations predicted most of the time for a decade or two.

Is anything going to happen to the companies who bought the data? Is that also illegal?

What companies are immediately going to be affected by this?

&quot;one or more&quot;<p>hint: it&#x27;s all of them

Some of the companies on this list could be hurt by this:<p>Alternativedata.org

Does this increase the value of this data for Google?

I think jailtime+fines should be the minimal remedy.

I&#x27;ve long believed that when companies do illegal things that would normally be punished by prison, the company should go to prison.<p>The company office would have to operate according to the same rules as a prison. Employees on arrival are security-checked the same way prisoners would be when they arrive for the first time. Rules about talking between cells, and device use, are the same as a prison. Once you get to your prison office, and you have your prison clothes on, you can work on paper.<p>I think this should be an existing prison. If a company wants to instead hire prison guards and do renovations to make their existing office work like a prison, I could be flexible to that.<p>Presumably all the employees would rather quit than work in prison. Sounds okay to me.<p>Presumably all investors would pressure the CEO to avoid getting the company put in prison because it would be a real productivity problem. Sounds okay to me.

Imagine someone time traveled here from 30 years ago first learning what cell phones are then seeing this headline. Why is this even debatable?

Toothless fines. Indict corporate officers or employees that did it... then you’ll get change.

Thank goodness for sanity!

I&#x27;ll celebrate when the money from the fines is actually sitting in the Treasury account, and not a moment before. Pai is outrageously corrupt, is best friends with telecom CEOs, and with near-certainty will cave to requests to have these punishments reduced to next-to-nothing.

But Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et al are still free to sell phone location data acquired through apps (or Android itself in the case of Google), right? I wonder if there is any hope of laws to limit the ability of companies to sell this data...