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Just before April ended, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that it would find the major carriers for sharing the location of its customers without their consent. Each carrier faced a different fine, with T-Mobile facing the highest amount at $80 million plus a $12 million fine to cover as part of its Sprint acquisition.
In response to this, AT&T has appealed the $57 million fine imposed to them. According to Law 360, AT&T called this order as an “abuse of discretion” on the FCC’s part. After all, the FCC spent several years investigating the action. Current FCC Chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, mentioned that the carriers had failed to “protect the information entrusted to them” by their customers by selling real-time location data to aggregators. In turn, these aggregators sold the information to bounty hunters and bail-bond companies.
In the statement, Rosenworcel said:
"This ugly practice violates the law — specifically Section 222 of the Communications Act, which protects the privacy of consumer data."
In its appeal, AT&T called the FCC’s actions as “arbitrary, capricious and contrary to the law.” The company also insisted that location data was not “customer proprietary network information,” which was part of the alleged violation accused by the FCC under Section 222 of the Communications Act.
AT&T is the first out of the major carriers to appeal the order of the FCC. With its move, T-Mobile and Verizon could soon appeal the FCC’s decision, especially since it intended to do so.
Source: PhoneArena
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