Selling 911 Location Data

Speaking of John Cook’s Data Privacy twitter account, as I did yesterday, here’s an interesting item:

It turns out that the carriers are selling 911 location data. This isn’t just the cell tower data that I wrote about before, but actual GPS data that is meant to be used only in support of the 911 emergency system. In the previous post I naively and reluctantly suggested that the government should get involved and make that behavior illegal. The thing is, using the 911 location data for anything other than 911 (or other things required by law) is already illegal. Ars Technica has a detailed article on the matter that notes the selling of this data is against federal law.

The FCC can and should levy fines on every carrier found guilty of doing this but the fines need to discourage the behavior. Something like 10 times the income from the practice would be appropriate. Otherwise, the fines are just written off as a cost of doing business. If I make \$10 from some illegal activity and you fine me \$1 for doing it, guess what’s going to happen. If the fines don’t do the trick, taking senior management on a perp walk might. It probably wouldn’t take more than one.

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