FCC Slaps Cell Carriers On Wrist For Selling User Data. Carriers Cry ▉

Lauren Feiner, senior policy reporter at The Verge:

The Federal Communications Commission is fining the largest US mobile carriers a combined nearly $200 million for allegedly illegally sharing customers’ location data without their consent.

The FCC says it found the carriers “sold access to its customers’ location information to ‘aggregators,’ who then resold access to such information to third-party location-based service providers.” The agency says the carriers effectively “attempted to offload” their responsibility to get customers’ consent to share their location data with “downstream recipients.” Even after being made aware of the issue, the FCC claims, the carriers still failed to limit access to the information.

I’m often of the mindset that Europe is a little too heavy handed with the regulation. Generally I find their heart to be in the right place but often the actual legislation lacking as it’s usually not a concise as we’re used to over here in the states. They’ve led the way on privacy laws at least conceptually and we here in the US can probably should take a good bit of inspiration form them in terms of drafting our own.

We’ve done it before. A lot of our Constitution and subsequent Bill of Rights stems from English law and extends them to protect individuals where we felt the English government over stepped its bounds. I mean there has to be some way to incorporate a healthy mix of the EU’s GDPR and our very own Fourth Amendment which guarantees our right to privacy.

But we won’t. Business gotta business and Facebook Meta and Google have to make money somehow.

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