AT&T Proclaims It Cannot Be Sued For Selling Your Location Data To Random Nitwits

AT&T Proclaims It Cannot Be Sued For Selling Your Location Data To Random Nitwits

5 years ago
Anonymous $MUlyiGRWxa

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190923/13160143046/att-proclaims-it-cannot-be-sued-selling-your-location-data-to-random-nitwits.shtml

You'll of course recall that wireless carriers are in the midst of a massive, ongoing scandal involving your location data. As in, they've been repeatedly caught collecting and selling your daily movement habits to a rotating crop of random nitwits, including stalkers and folks pretending to be law enforcement. And while they say they've stopped the practice there's no way to be sure, given that the current industry-friendly FCC has yet to pressure (or even mildly scold) them, much less conduct any real investigation into whether mobile carriers have actually stopped, or what they've done with location data collected over the last decade.

With regulatory capture ensuring that government is feckless in the face of the scandal, the EFF sued AT&T back in July on behalf of several California AT&T users who say they were never informed, nor gave consent, for their location data to be used and sold in this fashion. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T violated the Federal Communications Act by not protecting location data, and California's Unfair Competition Law and the Consumers Legal Remedies Act by misleading consumers as to the sale of this data. The group also pushed to have AT&T delete the trove of valuable location data it has already collected.