T-Mobile Fights $90 Million Location Privacy Fine

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T-Mobile Fights $90 Million Location Privacy Fine

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T-Mobile on Monday urged a federal appeals court to vacate a $90 million fine imposed by the Federal Communications Commission for sharing wireless customers' location data.

The fine is “arbitrary and capricious” and violates “fundamental principles of fair notice,” the company writes in an appellate brief filed with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Among other arguments, T-Mobile contends that the FCC hadn't previously said all location data should be treated as “customary proprietary network information,” and therefore subject to confidentiality rules. Instead, according to T-Mobile, the FCC only required carriers to keep location data confidential when it was directly tied to voice services -- essentially meaning that the data would reveal customers' locations when they were talking on the telephone.

The location data at the center of the fine came from “location-based services” connected to non-voice services -- such as the Life Alert program, which sends medical help to people, or roadside assistance company AAA -- T-Mobile says.

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“The FCC cannot impose massive penalties on past conduct based on a newly announced interpretation” of confidentiality requirements, T-Mobile wrote.

T-Mobile also argues the fine violated its right to a trial by jury, arguing that a jury trial would “prevent the FCC from improperly acting as rule-maker, investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury.”

The carrier's argument comes in response to the Federal Communications Commission's April order, issued by a 3-2 vote, fining the carrier -- as well as Verizon and AT&T -- for selling access to customers geolocation data to aggregators that resold the information to outside companies. (The FCC fined AT&T $57 million and Verizon $47 million. T-Mobile's $92 million fine included a $12 million fine for Sprint, which merged with T-Mobile in 2020. AT&T and Verizon are also challenging the fines, and made arguments similar to T-Mobile's.)

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr -- recently tapped by president-elect Donald Trump to lead the agency -- dissented from the decision to fine the carriers. He argued in a written dissent that the Federal Trade Commission was the appropriate agency to police the privacy practices at issue.

Carr also agreed with the carriers that the location data at the center of the fines hadn't previously been subject to confidentiality rules.

“Today’s FCC orders rest on a newfound definition of customer proprietary network information ... that finds no support in the Communications Act or FCC precedent,” he stated in April. “And without providing advance notice of the new legal duties expected of carriers (to the extent we could adopt those new duties at all), the FCC retroactively announces eye-popping forfeitures totaling nearly $200,000,000. These actions are inconsistent with the law and basic fairness.”

The FCC initially proposed the fines in 2020 -- around two years after it emerged 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 have said they no longer sell location data.

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November 26, 2024 at 04:19PM