Verizon Battles FCC Over Privacy Fine

Verizon asked a federal appellate court to nix the $47 million fine imposed by the Federal Communications Commission for sharing customers' location data. “The agency ignored the limits of its authority in these multiple ways, in an effort to show force against a large company that did nothing wrong,” Verizon argues in a written brief filed with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The company's new legal papers come in response to the Federal Communications Commission's April 2024 order, issued by a 3-2 vote, fining Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile for selling access to customers' geolocation data to aggregators that resold the information to outside companies. (The FCC fined AT&T $57 million and T-Mobile $92 million; those companies are also challenging the fines.) The FCC had initially proposed the fines in 2020 -- around two years after news broke that a Missouri sheriff used geolocation data provided by Securus Technology to track other law enforcement officers, without court orders. Securus obtained the location data from the phone carriers. Around one year later, Vice Media's Motherboard detailed how a journalist was able to pay a “bounty hunter” $300 to track a phone's location to a neighborhood in Queens. The major U.S. carriers say they no longer sell location data.