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FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

docs.fcc.gov

171–180 of 202 posts

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we did away with First Past The Post voting, we could have more then two sides. Then it could be "my side good, all other sides bad!" Progress.

I’m really hoping before I die citizens are just all collectively against big companies treating citizens like shit, and regardless of a political party, the government works for us and protect us

That would never be regardless of party. Part of choosing a party would be choosing whether you want them to work for you or for corporations.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#172
post #95
post #78

$200M is chump change. These carriers have been doing this for a long time. Nothing will change. At most, a footnote in the privacy policy will be added.

to clarify, this was a third party company called securus that offered a blanket deal to track practically everyone based on a deal they had with cellular companies to purchase tracking data. Securus normally only works with US prisoners. They were collecting data on everyone and then rebranding that capability/relationship as a service. it no longer exists apparently in a hamfisted attempt to avoid more litigation b…

The carriers can ping your phone to have it report its current GPS location. Passive collection of location scales better but the carrier directing the phone to actively transmit its current location is definitely a thing and you can't turn it off.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#173
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU didn't get this right - or else they aren't enforcing it. I'm in the EU right now and the crap I see is a popup "We respect your privacy. Us and 352 (not an exaggeration!) of our partners are collecting data on you. Approve or Details?" Pick details and you can spend your time going through the partners https://pasteboard.co/rrL2bpmiE6Zq.png And most you can't reject Even more hilarious. pageboard itself said…

This is mostly unenforced, as it WAS ruled that it must be as easy to reject as to accept. However, they're going after "consent to ads or buy a subscription" which I thought was a pretty fair compromise business model.

I'm generally okay with Ads, that is fair. But I'm not okay with tracking, consolidating data about me from different sources, analyzing it and selling that. It is too hard to understand how that may impact me and others.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#174

The core issue is transparency. I don't want to see a 'privacy policy', I want to see who a company has sold/given my information to and what limitations that sale has. The concept is simple. If you collect anything about me and allow some other entity access, you tell me about it/make it easy for me to see -and- block. Most of this abuse of personal data would go away if people knew it was going on.

I read somewhere if you call up a towing company, the wireless carrier will provide them your location.

they don't even say "your call^H^H^H^Hlocation will be recorded for quality purposes"

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#175
post #78

$200M is chump change. These carriers have been doing this for a long time. Nothing will change. At most, a footnote in the privacy policy will be added.

What a coincidence, I got an email from Verizon that my lines are going up $5 each and so is my Internet (ATT).

Good guy FCC raked in $200M in fines, while no prison time was handed out and $0 of those $200M goes to people whose privacy was infringed.

So really just a typical Monday, business as usual.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#176
post #175
post #78

$200M is chump change. These carriers have been doing this for a long time. Nothing will change. At most, a footnote in the privacy policy will be added.

What a coincidence, I got an email from Verizon that my lines are going up $5 each and so is my Internet (ATT). Good guy FCC raked in $200M in fines, while no prison time was handed out and $0 of those $200M goes to people whose privacy was infringed. So really just a typical Monday, business as usual.

The FCC can’t send people to prison. FCC fines do not preclude criminal prosecution.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#177

The core issue is transparency. I don't want to see a 'privacy policy', I want to see who a company has sold/given my information to and what limitations that sale has. The concept is simple. If you collect anything about me and allow some other entity access, you tell me about it/make it easy for me to see -and- block. Most of this abuse of personal data would go away if people knew it was going on.

Transparency is good, but I think it’s also important to impose contractual liability and fines too. GDPR has a good model here; a data processor must list all of their sub-processors, AND have contracts with each that let them enforce transitively your data deletion rights.

This guards against the case where a processor transparently updates their ToS to share your data with someone you do not consent to.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes a speeding ticket for someone making minimum wage look expensive

Look expensive? It means not eating

Yeah, it looks like that comparatively.

I don’t think you can just state the result for everyone.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#179
Some time ago I completely lost all faith in any company's ability and/or willingness to actually keep my personal information private, along with my government's ability and/or willingness to regulate or disincentivize.

These fines will just be chalked up as the "cost of doing business," and the abuses will continue unabated. The only way to protect your personal information is to not allow it to be collected in the first place.

If you carry a phone, only use it for emergencies, and otherwise keep it in airplane mode. Things like GPS navigation in Organic Maps, music and podcast files in local storage, etc. work just fine without the radio. Pay cash for everything. Never give your phone number to a store and don't use rewards programs. Pop out the DCM fuse in your car. Run a firewall that blackholes spy domains, use a VPN, and block scripts and cookies. Buy entertainment on discs, again with cash. If it's not available on physical media, either go without or download it over VPN. If I can't walk into a store and buy it with cash, I will never contribute to your revenue stream. Oh, and file your taxes with paper forms sent by mail directly to the IRS. Online tax services are spyware.

Unless you decide to go it alone on medical stuff there's nothing you can do about hospitals and insurance companies fsking you over. Your employer's payroll processing company probably sells your financial info to Equifax's The Work Number, which you can allegedly freeze, I guess. For these abuses I feel government needs to get ruthless. Like, if your establishment exposes highly sensitive medical information for $thousands of people, you don't get to exist any more. Smoking crater. Prison time. Liquidated assets. Game over. Next time keep those records offline.

The world managed to run hospitals with paper forms for about 4,000 years, so you can walk records across the office on encrypted USB drives if you have to. There are 4TiB MicroSD cards now, so embed storage in employee badges that only keeps relevant records for patients they're actually caring for that day. That sort of thing just needs to be the cost of doing business with information that's that sensitive, because if it's all sitting on a network, someone somewhere sometime will inevitably screw something up.

So long as it's okay to leak private information every few years as an externality, they will continue to deploy and run systems that drive their operational costs to the absolute bottom while treating any risks to your privacy as irrelevant.

Re: FCC fines largest wireless carriers for sharing location data

#180

The core issue is transparency. I don't want to see a 'privacy policy', I want to see who a company has sold/given my information to and what limitations that sale has. The concept is simple. If you collect anything about me and allow some other entity access, you tell me about it/make it easy for me to see -and- block. Most of this abuse of personal data would go away if people knew it was going on.

> I want to see

They can still just lie though.

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