T-Mobile has had a pretty good year so far, increasing customers and revenue with its wireless business, while also branching out to other sectors like home internet service. The brand has also made big news with its recent acquisitions, along with major changes that its customers didn’t receive well.
Furthermore, we’ve seen the brand payout a huge settlement due to a major data breach, and it now looks like it’s going to be paying even more thanks to a huge fine from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The news comes from Fierce Network, sharing that after an appeal, T-Mobile/Sprint will be forced to pay a $92 million fine due to its failure to protect its customers (via Android Authority).
Another fine for T-Mobile
As you can imagine, this is a pretty huge sum, but more importantly, it sheds light on the privacy issues that are prevalent among wireless carriers in the US. This particular issue comes from the misuse of location-based services (LBS) information by third parties. According to the Fierce Network post, carriers were aware that third-parties were abusing this data, yet did nothing to stop it.
Naturally, T-Mobile isn’t the only carrier caught in this storm, with AT&T and Verizon also in the same boat. However, a judgment has not been made in the case of AT&T and Verizon, so it’s unclear whether these two carriers will also be fined for the same issue. But, if we were to place our bets, we’d say that both brands are going to see some type of fine for this issue.
What’s interesting about all of this is the quotes pulled by Fierce Network, which state that T-Mobile doesn’t deny what happened, but argues “that the undisputed facts do not amount to a violation of the law.” The carrier takes things even further by stating “the commission misinterpreted the Communications Act, miscalculated the penalties and violated the Seventh Amendment by not affording them a jury trial. Because the carriers’ arguments lack merit, we deny the petitions for review.”
While T-Mobile states that it has not shared these data points for some years now, this is most likely due to the fact that this is around the same time that these problems first came to light. Privacy has become one of the most important matters in the digital age. With so many different databases that keep all our information, it’s important that companies don’t find ways to abuse this data for the sake of profit.
