T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon slapped with $200M fine — here’s what they illegally did with your data
T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon slapped with $200M fine — here’s what they illegally did with your data
The FCC says the four major carriers shared sensitive user data without their knowledge.
"customers’ real-time location information, revealing where they go and who they are.”
All of them did it. That either means collusion or they're all evil and bold enough to do this despite the risk. Either way, this was not an accidental slip up or a hack. Jail time and a crippling fine is the solution. This is neither.
That amount of evil and bold has simply become the norm for corporations, so that seems a no-brainer, collusion is not needed.
Or participated in a Black program that paid enough to cover the risk of fines
Wonderful. Now where's my share?
Don't worry, you'll get a check for like $3.50 three years from now.
Not even. Looking at the 2023 Q4 subscriber counts listed on Wikipedia that's about 500 million devices, so the total fine amounts to less than 50¢ per customer.
Someone please tell me I'm calculating that terribly wrong, because I'm feeling quite angry at such a meaningless penalty.
And 6 free months of "identity protection" which is actually just a total farce.
The lawyers who filed suit will take most of it.
Well, you can sue them directly... Or you could, if you can show that you have standing. That means if they shared your specific personal information illegally then you could sue them. If you're lucky, some blood sucking lawyers will do the leg work and find out the details. Then they'll file a class action lawsuit against these companies and we'll all get emails saying, "You may be eligible for compensation! Come to our website and give us a bunch of private information so we can see if you are owed big bucks! Oh, and we promise we wont sell your information, you can trust us!"
And the cycle of life goes on...
Fine them with a percentage of their revenue, then it would actually matter.
Or better yet, do that and also prison time for all the criminals who were involved in the planning of this crime.
Hiding behing an LLC shouldn't prevent criminals from going to prison.
exactly 200mil is less than what they make in a day.
If I take the example of T-Mobile their fine (80 M$) is 8 days of net income based on their average net income of the past 4 years.
Evidence that the tiktok ban is not about privacy. It's ok when our corporations do it
They never claimed it to be about privacy from American corporations. That’s why divestment to an American ownership is an option in the bill. They don’t want tremendous amounts of American user data to be collected by a company beholden to the Chinese government.
But that's the thing. US corporations are sure as hell to continue that same data collection and sell it. China does bulk data buys from US social media companies. The ban does not in any way do anything to prevent the Chinese government from obtaining that data. It's extremely obvious cold war political nonsense.
How do you get from $200 million in fines to "it's ok"?
How much do you think they made off selling your data?
This is just the government’s cut. Cost to play,
Because tiktok has not done anything criminal and being forced to divest, while this fine is likely a fraction of the profits these companies made.
Senator Ron Wyden has been working on this problem for years. Nice to see something happened.
Wait until we find out they’re doing the same thing with all of our data. Pictures, sites visited, products browsed, etc.