• by Wendy Davis , November 7, 2024

Verizon this week asked a federal appellate court to nix the $47 million fine imposed by the Federal Communications Commission for sharing customers' location data.

“The agency ignored the limits of its authority in these multiple ways, in an effort to show force against a large company that did nothing wrong,” Verizon argues in a written brief filed this week with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

The telecom's new legal papers come in response to the Federal Communications Commission's April order, issued by a 3-2 vote, fining Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile for selling access to customers geolocation data to aggregators that resold the information to outside companies. (The FCC fined AT&T $57 million and T-Mobile $92 million; those companies are also challenging the fines.)

The FCC had initially proposed the fines in 2020 -- around two years after news broke that a Missouri sheriff used geolocation data provided by Securus Technology to track other law enforcement officers, without court orders. Securus obtained the location data from the phone carriers. Around one year later, Vice Media's Motherboard detailed how a journalist was able to pay a “bounty hunter” $300 to track a phone's location to a neighborhood in Queens.

The major U.S. carriers say they no longer sell location data.

Verizon is now asking the appeals court to vacate the fine for several reasons. Among other arguments, Verizon says the FCC is only empowered to enforce privacy standards for “customer proprietary network information”-- which Verizon argues is limited to data directly relating to voice calls.

Verizon says the location data it provided to aggregators came from its “location-based service” program, which obtains geo-location data from cell towers, and then provides that data to companies like Life Alert or AAA. That cell-tower data, according to Verizon, is not “customer proprietary network information” because it's obtained whenever devices are turned on, regardless of whether customers are making phone calls at the time.

Verizon also says it took “took numerous measures to protect its subscribers’ information and to ensure that a service provider obtained affirmative consent to share device location information before requesting that information.”

For instance, the company says it vetted participants in the location-based services program, and also reviewed whether they obtained consumers' consent to location-sharing.

The company adds that the FCC shouldn't have imposed a fine without proving its case in court.

“The Constitution guarantees Verizon a jury trial ... before it faces an order compelling it to pay a forfeiture,” the company writes.

The 2nd Circuit hasn't yet said when it will hear arguments in the matter.