The US government has imposed significant fines on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon following an investigation that revealed these top wireless carriers had unlawfully shared customers' personal data without consent. The fines were a result of allegations made by the Federal Communications Commission in 2020, accusing the companies of sharing users' geolocation histories with third parties, including prisons, as part of their commercial programs.
The fines were targeted at the practice of sharing user location information with data resellers, known as 'location aggregators,' who then passed on the data to their own third-party customers. Despite promises to cease this practice after public scrutiny in 2018, the carriers took nearly a year or longer to halt the data sharing, as per the FCC.
