Feed: Slashdot
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Title: Court Rejects Verizon Claim That Selling Location Data Without Consent
Is Legal

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/11/20212...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon lost an
attempt to overturn a $46.9 million fine for selling customer location data
without its users' consent. The US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit
rejected Verizon's challenge in a ruling (PDF) issued today. The Federal
Communications Commission fined the three major carriers last year for
violations revealed in 2018. The companies sued the FCC in three different
courts, with varying results. AT&T beat the FCC in the reliably
conservative US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, while T-Mobile lost in
the District of Columbia Circuit. Although FCC Chairman Brendan Carr voted
against (PDF) the fine last year, when the commission had a Democratic
majority, his FCC urged the courts to uphold the Biden-era decisions. A
ruling against the FCC could gut the agency's ability to issue financial
penalties. The different rulings from different circuits raise the odds of
the cases being taken up by the Supreme Court. Today's 2nd Circuit ruling
against Verizon was issued unanimously by a panel of three judges, and it
comes to the same legal conclusions as the DC Circuit did in the T-Mobile
case. The court did not accept the carrier's argument that the fine violated
its Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial and that the location data wasn't
protected under the law used by the FCC to issue the penalties. "We disagree
[with Verizon]," the 2nd Circuit ruling said. "The customer data at issue
plainly qualifies as customer proprietary network information, triggering the
Communication Act's privacy protections. And the forfeiture order both
soundly imposed liability and remained within the strictures of the penalty
cap. Nothing about the Commission's proceedings, moreover, transgressed the
Seventh Amendment's jury trial guarantee. Indeed, Verizon had, and chose to
forgo, the opportunity for a jury trial in federal court. Thus, we DENY
Verizon's petition." Until 2019, the ruling said Verizon operated a location-
based services program that sold customer location data through
intermediaries like LocationSmart and Zumigo, who then resold it to dozens of
third-party entities. Instead of directly managing consent and notifications,
Verizon "largely delegated those functions via contract" to its partners, a
system that came under scrutiny after a 2018 New York Times report exposed
security breaches. One major misuse involved Securus Technologies, which "was
misusing the program to enable law enforcement officers to access location
data without customers' knowledge or consent, so long as the officers
uploaded a warrant or some other legal authorization," the ruling said.
Verizon argued that Section 222 of the Communications Act only covered call-
location data, but the court ruled that device-location data also qualifies
as protected customer information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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