FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data
docs.fcc.gov
docs.fcc.gov
Anything shy is begging companies to dark-engineer patterns around obtaining it.
https://pasteboard.co/rrL2bpmiE6Zq.png
And most you can't reject
Even more hilarious. pageboard itself said 847 partners!
I.e. all companies really want to be in the business of tracking customers, because they can repackage derivative products and increase their revenue.
So the "subscription" option ends up experiencing a lack of support, mysterious technical issues, underinvestment, etc.
End result, customers don't choose it, which businesses use to lobby for further eroding mandates.
You can't force a company to provide and support a product they don't want to. You can force them to turn one off.
The first reg this happens in will I think make billions the world over realize this is what the template of all opt-in online regulation has to be and will hopefully change the world.
If you boil the lobster all at once, the huge ad industry will ensure such regulation never passes.
If you gradually increase regulation, then it stands a change of actually passing, and eventually accomplishes the same goal (even if over a longer timeframe).
Getting everyone to agree that a mandatory, regulated prompt is required is step 1.
Me? I just use cash everywhere and now the guy at harbor freight knows I'm the guy who says 'I dont have a cell phone number'.
Contracts you know, they need to benefit both sides.
Opt-in doesn't fix anything. Only by making these practices illegal (and aggressively enforcing the law) can this be stopped.
I'd like auditable data. I should have an easy way to discover everyone with my data (including things like IP logs), see how it's used (at the level of source), and have it destroyed.
To expand on this more - I feel like laws requiring companies to keep a "custody chain" of personal data at every transfer step would be relatively un-controversial. Sure, I'd rather do away with personal data being able to be bought and sold entirely, but an easy first step is "massive fines for any company that doesn't carefully track exactly which entity touched the user's data".
they don't even say "your call^H^H^H^Hlocation will be recorded for quality purposes"
They can still just lie though.
This guards against the case where a processor transparently updates their ToS to share your data with someone you do not consent to.
GDPR proves this wrong. Most people click OK/accept even in front of relatively clear information (to be fair sometimes the options are "accept for you to be tracked and shared with 'our partners' or pay a subscription/fee", which is an easy choice for many.
"Most" may be correct, but given how annoying those banners are I would not read too much into that.
"Ok" then "Customize" followed by a bunch of checkboxes to disable cookies while the "accept all button" is where typically "OK" would be and the "reject all" is often labeled something else that isn't clear.
This is also not often remembered on future visits so you end up doing this dance every time you visit that site.
"well, I'm not sure if they're going to start collecting or using my data, because I don't actually really KNOW that or the extent of everything, just an email from them with a vague update to an equally vague privacy policy that I apparently implicitly agree to if I don't discontinue using their service."
Just like a manufacturer/seller on say, amazon shouldn't be able to revise their product with cheaper quality under the same model number (and yet it happens all the time), changes to the agreement of a service should be treated as a new service.
Whatever the solution, it should be a big enough deal that it cannot be implicitly agreed to, and clear enough language (maybe vetted by a third party review of the agreement) to communicate to all users, what is at stake and how, to which third parties, etc.
What an easy choice to be nagged at every new website.
Nothing will change. At most, a footnote in the privacy policy will be added.
But how much did they make from selling it? The fact $200M is "chump change" because they made $200B (or whatever) is hardly relevant. If they made far less than $200M then they're going to stop doing it, period.
https://securustechnologies.tech/investigative/investigation...
no technical details yet though about how precise the tracking was...im a bit hazy on where the carrier modem stops and where the firmware/hardware start (thats probably by design...) Is it possible to poll GPS in realtime for coordinates? likely not...is it likely the ASN was polled from towers to provide a range of affinity for a user? definitely.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/10/23065777/att-route-911-ca...
Does the SIM card have a program that somehow can access the GPS sensor via the baseband processor?
https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/att-rolls-out-gps-ba...
Good guy FCC raked in $200M in fines, while no prison time was handed out and $0 of those $200M goes to people whose privacy was infringed.
So really just a typical Monday, business as usual.
Shareholders tend to be unhappy with "We were fined for doing this, and so we kept doing it and now owe another fine."
Also, exec bodies/courts/juries tend to be more skeptical of an ignorance defense if a company was literally fined for doing that exact thing previously.
If the fine is $ABC, and that fine never changes, but profits grow from $ABC x3 to $ABC x10, shareholders will actually get mad that the corporation doesn't continue the activity in question because there's net profit growth.
Sadly, sometimes the cost of quelling an FCC or SEC violation charge is simple "lobbying".
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/the-supreme-court-...
(The Supreme Court declined to hear the case)
“We were fined $20 million for something that makes us $200 million” is a no brainer choice to a shareholder.
And the probability of getting that fine imposed is far less than 1.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1197963517/dupont-chemours-ch...
Only if the fine exceeds what they made. Otherwise, shareholders tend to more side with the "try to keep that shit on the down low next time eh?" approach when they're still making money.
Yes, it stops them from doing that exact same thing again while incentivizing the general behavior of intentionally breaking laws until told to stop.
Is this to be able to analyse "the market" (how regular humans are consuming)?
> Eric Swanson, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that early in the pandemic, when things were changing quickly, the Fed looked at online rent prices, anonymized cellphone location data and credit card transaction data.
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/03/20/the-fed-loves-a-data-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/08/19/129298095/with...
To estimate the time it takes for T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon combined to generate $196 million in revenue, we need to calculate their combined daily revenue.
Let's assume the combined daily revenue of the three companies is:
T-Mobile: $45.5 million (as estimated earlier) AT&T: $125.6 million (as estimated earlier) Verizon: $349.3 million (as estimated earlier) Combined daily revenue: 45.5 million + 125.6 million + 349.3 million = 520.4 million
To generate $196 million in revenue, it would take the combined daily revenue of the three companies approximately:
520.4 million (combined daily revenue) ÷ 24 (hours in a day) = 21.6 million/hour. 196 million (fine amount) ÷ 21.6 ≈ 9.07 hours.
It's also a less interesting approach than it would be by looking at profit, which is closer to the real impact.
Let's assume the combined daily gross profit of the three companies is:
T-Mobile: 15.5 million (estimated gross margin of 34% on 45.5 million revenue) AT&T: 42.5 million (estimated gross margin of 34% on 125.6 million revenue) Verizon: 121.5 million (estimated gross margin of 35% on 349.3 million revenue) Combined daily gross profit: 15.5 million + 42.5 million + 121.5 million = 179.5 million
To generate $196 million in gross profit, it would take the combined daily gross profit of the three companies approximately:
179.5 million (combined daily gross profit) ÷ 196 million (target gross profit) ≈ 1.09 days
I'm not seeing anything here preventing the carriers from just adding "sharing location data" to the EULA / privacy policy that no one reads and continuing on - now with "consent". Without a requirement to offer a separate opt-out, this just seems like a temporary road bump that changes nothing in the long run.
>The Commission has also recognized that an
>opt-in requirement alone is not enough to protect customer CPNI, especially in light of tactics like
>“pretexting,” where a party pretends to be a particular customer or other authorized person in order to
>illegally obtain access to that customer’s information (thus circumventing opt-in requirements).17
I saw such clauses and I’m sure it was about pulling data from your phone carrier.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveill...
Cape dials up $61M from A16Z and more for mobile service without personal data
2 points by jseliger | April 18 2024
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40080673
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/18/cape-dials-up-61m-from-a16...
https://www.google.com/search?q=does+google+fi+sell+users%27...
These fines will just be chalked up as the "cost of doing business," and the abuses will continue unabated. The only way to protect your personal information is to not allow it to be collected in the first place.
If you carry a phone, only use it for emergencies, and otherwise keep it in airplane mode. Things like GPS navigation in Organic Maps, music and podcast files in local storage, etc. work just fine without the radio. Pay cash for everything. Never give your phone number to a store and don't use rewards programs. Pop out the DCM fuse in your car. Run a firewall that blackholes spy domains, use a VPN, and block scripts and cookies. Buy entertainment on discs, again with cash. If it's not available on physical media, either go without or download it over VPN. If I can't walk into a store and buy it with cash, I will never contribute to your revenue stream. Oh, and file your taxes with paper forms sent by mail directly to the IRS. Online tax services are spyware.
Unless you decide to go it alone on medical stuff there's nothing you can do about hospitals and insurance companies fsking you over. Your employer's payroll processing company probably sells your financial info to Equifax's The Work Number, which you can allegedly freeze, I guess. For these abuses I feel government needs to get ruthless. Like, if your establishment exposes highly sensitive medical information for $thousands of people, you don't get to exist any more. Smoking crater. Prison time. Liquidated assets. Game over. Next time keep those records offline.
The world managed to run hospitals with paper forms for about 4,000 years, so you can walk records across the office on encrypted USB drives if you have to. There are 4TiB MicroSD cards now, so embed storage in employee badges that only keeps relevant records for patients they're actually caring for that day. That sort of thing just needs to be the cost of doing business with information that's that sensitive, because if it's all sitting on a network, someone somewhere sometime will inevitably screw something up.
So long as it's okay to leak private information every few years as an externality, they will continue to deploy and run systems that drive their operational costs to the absolute bottom while treating any risks to your privacy as irrelevant.
Anyone using these vendors noticed any weaker data signals/availability that could be related to this? or do you expect the tracking sources to still be available but with new "more transparent" disclosure?
T-Mobile – $80 million fine (T-Mobile US annual revenue for 2021 was $80.118B)
AT&T - $57 million fine (AT&T revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2024 was $122.317B)
Verizon - $47 million fine (Verizon annual revenue for 2023 was $133.974B)
T-Mobile - 0.0009 of revenue
AT&T - 0.0004 of revenue
Verizon - 0.0003 of revenue
I don’t think you can just state the result for everyone.
$2.00 FCC Fine Recovery Charge
Just read the article and note that this was discovered in 2018, the FCC decided to do something in 2020, and from then until now it's been gridlocked by Republican party obstruction on the panel.
And this isn't nearly the end of it. It'll go to court under appeal, for more years, and who knows how that falls.
The result is regulators like the FCC and SEC barely enforce any standard of corporate behavior. A big part of it is they've been so gutted they don't have the resources to meet the necessary volume even in the absence partisan gridlock.
This is what happens when "Government bad, regulations bad" rhetoric comes home to roost. The violators pay a token fine and the average American gets screwed.
Maybe we should rethink that rhetoric just a bit?
Blatant emotional manipulation is not suitable for HN.
The line
> Maybe we should rethink that rhetoric just a bit?
exists purely to manipulate others. There's no logic, no reason, no intellect - just base degradation of others through condescension and attempts at imputing shame. Comments like this are utterly inappropriate for HN, as a casual reading of the linked HN guidelines would show.
I do not in any way agree my line above is somehow emotional manipulation. I think you're being overly defensive.
Also possibly not; it depends on the particulars and the judge.
The first amendment would have nothing to do with that actual law though (since if it were, literally anything could be considered a grievance)
Sure would be a shame if someone leaked this guy's location history.
I mean c'mon it's just common sense that if your location when you place a call must be kept private then your location when you're just walking around not making a call is also private.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...
Wouldn't future sales also be fined?
If the fines are cheap, companies have every motivation to try and see if they get away with shady or even knowingly illegal behavior - if not, the fine won't hurt too much and if yes, free profit.
If the fines hurt even the first time, there's a much bigger motivation to actually comply with the law from the start.
"Hi, my name is ___. I am asking you to support and, if possible, co-sponsor the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024. My zip code for constituent survey purposes is ___."
https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2024/4/committee-chairs-cant...
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/3F5EEA76-5B18...
Deleted comment
No, it's barely more.
Are you asserting FCC fines have produced results in these high audience press release cases?
Famously they have not.
This seems fundamentally unserious. To scope it, Verizon's gross profit for the twelve months ending December 31, 2023 was $79.087B.
Increase the fines by 2 orders of magnitude, that will get their attention.
(Still might be ignorable)
As if there are other "big carriers."
Here is how they will do it too. Them: 'have you seen our NEW plan? It is amazing. It is only 5 dollars, the cost of a cup of coffee, more a month and all the amazing new things you get access to.' Me: looks at their plan. Me: 'Seems about the same as my previous one.' Them: 'But this NEW one is amazing. Our glossy advert campaign says so.'
They will not say they are raising prices because of it. They will sell you on how their new plan is 'better' and make your bear the cost (plus a little more for them).
I sat in a meeting where one company was selling unlimited plans. The company I was working for were still selling 1MB per month at 40 bucks a megabyte. They said their customers would pay it and more because of who they were. They are tone deaf and blind to it. The second the advert campaigns changed the tone of the meetings changed. In that case they had to change their pricing because of external pressures. However in this case all the carriers are being zinged. They will all raise prices. Because for sure they are not going to cover it.
You know it to be true. But do not like it which is fair. I do not like it much either.
So, not really any competitors to go to when the entire industry colludes to violate privacy.
You have to fine the drivers of the corporation's unethical behavior, not the corporation itself, or else there will be no fundamental change or reason for corporations at large to not act with complete disregard for the law.
The shady shit would stop in a heartbeat if some 25-30 people at the top had to collectively come up with a billion+ in cash in a week. No bonds, debt, IOU's from the corporation itself, stocks, mortgages, nothing - straight up cash.