The fines target a practice in which carriers shared user location information with data resellers, known in the industry as "location aggregators." These aggregators passed the data onward to their own third-party customers.
Each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained.
AT&T must pay $57 million, while Verizon was fined nearly $47 million. Sprint was fined $12 million and T-Mobile $80 million. Since the investigation began, Sprint and T-Mobile merged in 2020.
In response to the FCC fines, all of the wireless carriers said they expect to appeal the decision.
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