For decades, major U.S. wireless providers have collected sensitive customer movement and location data (often down to the meter), then sold it to a long list of random dipshits — usually without bothering to clearly inform customers or get their consent. Five years ago, this resulted in folks like stalkers and people pretending to be law enforcement abusing said data.
Though this behavior had been going on for years generating untold billions, it only gained mainstream attention thanks to a 2018 New York Times story showcasing how police and the prison system routinely bought access to this data (then failed to secure it). In 2020, the FCC finally proposed fining wireless carriers $196 million ($91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon).
Five years later, the three major carriers (who appealed the fines to three different courts) are still fighting accountability in court. With varying degrees of success. AT&T recently managed to convince the Trumplican-stocked Fifth circuit to vacate its fine entirely. The Fifth circuit claimed the FCC’s fines violated AT&T’s Seventh Amendment protections to have a jury trial (which wouldn’t happen in the binding arbitration era anyway).
The other two carriers aren’t having the same luck. Back in August, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shot down T-Mobile claims that selling sensitive location data didn’t violate the law. Verizon is also having bad luck dodging its fines after the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit shot down both Verizon (and the Fifth Circuit’s) claims:
“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.”
The different rulings all but guarantee that the cases will head to the Trump-stocked Supreme Court, which is more than likely to shoot down the fines entirely as part of their steady evisceration of the federal regulatory state. Again, keep in mind this is happening five years after the fines were first levied, demonstrating precisely the kind of legal consumer rights protections corporations, the Trump administration, and many “free market Libertarians” want Americans to have (none).
This is now the fate of any federal effort to protect consumers (or labor rights, or the environment, or public safety). Corporations want a country where regulators have no authority to do literally anything they don’t like. They’re quite successfully building a country where you have little to no real protections against the very worst impulses of corporate power.
With the federal government all but defanged and lobotomized, their next target is any states that get the crazy notion of trying to protect consumers. And since there’s only a handful of states that actually try on this front (or can afford to with any consistency), that’s not likely to be a very lengthy fight.
This is all going to cause no limit of legal chaos and very real, very painful harms (and deaths) for decades to come, yet you’ll notice the corporate press, owned by people clearly in favor of unchecked corporatism, usually don’t think the frontal assault on federal consumer protection is worth covering.
You’ll see occasional stories about how the Supreme Court has destroyed federal consumer protection, but only from the likes of ProPublica, and nothing at the scale that really matches the horrors waiting just over the horizon. I remain broadly unconvinced that most of the U.S. public understands what’s coming.
