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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

$200M is chump change. These carriers have been doing this for a long time.

Nothing will change. At most, a footnote in the privacy policy will be added.

> $200M is chump change. These carriers have been doing this for a long time.

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.

to clarify, this was a third party company called securus that offered a blanket deal to track practically everyone based on a deal they had with cellular companies to purchase tracking data. Securus normally only works with US prisoners. They were collecting data on everyone and then rebranding that capability/relationship as a service. it no longer exists apparently in a hamfisted attempt to avoid more litigation beyond the FCC judgement.

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.

According to AT&T, yes they can get your GPS location. In this article they claim they only do so when the user is making a 911 call, to which I say “yeah right”.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/10/23065777/att-route-911-ca...

How does this work? I assumed it was tower triangulation, but the article makes it sound like it really is using GPS location.

Does the SIM card have a program that somehow can access the GPS sensor via the baseband processor?

Not a clue, but according to AT&T in the article below "It is already present in all Apple and Android smartphones. An AT&T spokesperson told Fierce via email, "There is no need to deploy anything new for smartphones." I'd be interested if anyone knew how they're doing it.

https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/att-rolls-out-gps-ba...

The carriers can ping your phone to have it report its current GPS location. Passive collection of location scales better but the carrier directing the phone to actively transmit its current location is definitely a thing and you can't turn it off.

What a coincidence, I got an email from Verizon that my lines are going up $5 each and so is my Internet (ATT).

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.

The FCC can’t send people to prison. FCC fines do not preclude criminal prosecution.

The amount is not the point. It's the fact that they were fined.

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.

Shareholders also don't care if the behavior continues so long as the profits from the behavior continue to vastly outweigh the cost of the activity in question.

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".

The business community seems pretty upset by the penalties the SEC has been levying lately...

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/the-supreme-court-...

(The Supreme Court declined to hear the case)

To be fair, they are not mutually exclusive. Businesses are incentivized to fight penalties as long as they think the legal costs are small enough compared to the fines themselves, regardless whether the activity their fine on was still profitable after the fine.

Shareholders don’t care about that.

“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...

What if the pitch were "we made $10x selling this data and were fined $x" - seems quite compelling if you're amoral about it.

> Shareholders tend to be unhappy with "We were fined for doing this, and so we kept doing it and now owe another fine."

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.

> that exact thing previously.

Yes, it stops them from doing that exact same thing again while incentivizing the general behavior of intentionally breaking laws until told to stop.

This is a bribe masquerading as a fine.

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