Long term readers know that one of my hobbyhorses is corporate surveillance and privacy. I haven’t written much about it lately because there’s been no real news. Corporations have continued snooping into as many of our actions as they can and have kept hoovering up our personal information to sell to “data aggregators”.
One particularly pernicious type of surveillance is location information. Access to it allows the snoopers to infer all sorts of information about us: our sexual preferences, whether we or our spouses are pregnant, our religion or lack of it, our health problems, and a multitude of other sensitive information.
For years the carriers have been playing a form of wack-a-mole with the FCC. Although they’re legally required to safeguard our location information the carriers have continued to sell it and claim that the people they sell it to are responsible for safeguarding it and procuring our permission to use it. And those people, of course, claim that the people that they sell it to are responsible.
The FCC has finally had enough. They’ve announced almost 200 million dollars in fines to AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon. The carriers, of course, are proclaiming their innocence and promising to appeal.
I don’t know for sure but I’d guess that each of the carriers make much more than the $200 million from the sale of the information. That means that the fines are simply a cost of doing business. Things won’t change until the fines are of the sort “three times however much you sold the information for”. That’s probably not legal but that’s what it will take to put an end to this despicable behavior.
You can read the FCC’s official press release here.