A federal appeals court has upheld a $46.9 million fine imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Verizon for illegally sharing customer location data.
The penalty is part of a larger enforcement action from April 2024, when the FCC fined the nation’s largest wireless carriers a total of nearly $200 million for mishandling sensitive information. In addition to Verizon’s fine, T-Mobile was penalized $80 million, AT&T $57 million, and Sprint (since acquired by T-Mobile) $12 million.
According to the FCC, the carriers sold real-time location information to data aggregators, which allowed the data to be accessed by unauthorized third parties, including bounty hunters and bail-bond companies.
In its ruling on Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Verizon’s legal challenge, affirming that the location data “plainly qualifies as customer proprietary network information” protected under federal law. Verizon, which paid the penalty while pursuing its appeal, did not immediately comment on the decision. All carriers involved had previously vowed to challenge the fines.
The FCC investigation, which began after lawmakers expressed outrage over the practice in 2019, found that the carriers relied on inadequate contractual promises from data purchasers to obtain customer consent. The commission also concluded that even after becoming aware of unauthorized access, the companies failed to implement reasonable safeguards to protect their customers’ privacy.
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