The Big Three Wireless Carriers slapped with $140 million in fines for selling location data

[thewayne]

They were caught selling, without permission, the constant location data of you, me, everyone in the USA with a mobile phone to aggregators who then sold it on to more people, again, without our permission.

From the article: "The FCC’s findings against AT&T, for example, show that AT&T sold customer location data directly or indirectly to at least 88 third-party entities. The FCC found Verizon sold access to customer location data (indirectly or directly) to 67 third-party entities. Location data for Sprint customers found its way to 86 third-party entities, and to 75 third-parties in the case of T-Mobile customers." Note that the discovery and scope of the investigation was before and during the T-Mobile/Sprint merger.

SO. Let's break this down. Krebs provides a link to the FCC web site that lists the formal announcement of the fines. In which, it includes the specific breakdown per carrier. In this case, Verizon, my carrier, was fined almost $47 million dollars US.

I asked Microsoft's Bing AI Co-Pilot to do a little math for me.

In 2023, Verizon Wireless reported net profit of $76.7 billion dollars US. I wanted to know how long it would take, in seconds, for Verizon to make that much money. Now, this is net profit. Here's Bing's response:

... it would take Verizon Wireless approximately 18,879 seconds (or about 5 hours and 14 minutes) to earn $46 million from their annual revenue of $76.7 billion

Five and a quarter hours. That's 1/32nd of a WEEK. An utterly insignificant rounding error.

The percentage of the fine versus 2023 gross profit? 0.058% One-seventeenth of ONE PERCENT of their profit. There's a reason why it's called gross profit.

Oh, and just how much was their gross profit? $79.087 billion USD. So it cost them $3 billion in people, equipment, trucks, tower rentals, FCC airwave licenses, etc. to generate $76bUSD in net profit. I should take a look at their stock ticker over the last few years, I expect it ain't going down.

I'm in the wrong line of work.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/fcc-fines-major-u-s-wireless-carriers-for-selling-customer-location-data/

Comments

[disneydream06]

Just another slap on the wrist. ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I agree, we are in the wrong line of work. :o
Hugs, Jon

[moxie_man]

As Disneydream06 said: Just a slap on the wrist. They need to charge fines that actually hurt. Not ones that can be written off as the cost of doing business.

[silveradept]

It's clear that the only way that fines are going to hurt is if they are charged as percentages of gross revenue per violation, rather than fixed amounts, even if those amounts seem to be pretty large, because of that "the fines were worth five hours of business profit" situation. If each of those violations had come with a "1% of gross revenue for each violation" penalty, then there might be a reason to actually pay attention and not do things illegally. It would be nice if those companies had to pay out most of their gross revenue in a year in fines. We certainly could use it to support social safety programs.

[thewayne]

I have a feeling they may be bound by statute, like Trumplestiltskin only being slapped with $1,000 fine for contempt of court.

[silveradept]

Probably. And they make sense for things where an average person would not have that kind of personal wealth lying around, but for corporations, these are probably coming out of petty cash.