Washington Aims To Protect Consumer Data From Companies Foreign And Domestic

Remember when our native political class was united behind the idea that the social media platform TikTok was such a threat to children, privacy, and national security that it had to be banned (or sold to a U.S. company)?

Their moral panic about our privacy led to a law being passed to ban or force the sale of dreaded social apps. Now, a federal court must determine whether what Washington officials did was legal.

As that drama over privacy and security plays out, another just wrapped up without much bipartisan political posturing or ex-constitutional grandstanding.

It involves the major phone companies and their sales of customer location data to just about anyone with a working checkbook, all without customer knowledge or permission and probably illegally, too.

What's going on here? Brian Krebs writes that the FCC fined the major cell carriers for their actions. But it took years – and a series of broken promises from the carriers – to get to this point:

The FCC said it found the carriers each sold access to its customers' location information to ‘aggregators,' who then resold access to the information to third-party location-based service providers.

“In doing so, each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained,” an FCC statement on the action reads. “This initial failure was compounded when, after becoming aware that their safeguards were ineffective, the carriers continued to sell access to location information without taking reasonable measures to protect it from unauthorized access.”

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.

It wasn't an oversight. It was the business model. The amount of the fines compared to revenue is paltry. This is another to say that net-net pays pretty well to abuse your customers and skirt the law.

Let's not forget that the fines come from the corporate treasury. Once again, the customers whose monthly bills feed the corporate bank account get fleeced.

Where's the political outrage over this? There's some, to be sure. But the rest of them, who were so deeply, passionately concerned about a faceless menacing entity spying on us for gain and nefarious purposes, are nowhere to be found, at least when a group of American companies are the ones doing the shady, privacy invading activity.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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