• by Wendy Davis , January 21, 2025

Advocacy groups are urging a federal appellate court to uphold T-Mobile's $92 million fine for sharing wireless customers' location data.

“The vast majority of American consumers use mobile devices, and nearly three-quarters keep them nearby or on their person wherever they go,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center and other watchdogs write in a friend-of-the-court brief filed late last week with the D.C.Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Those subscribers deserve the privacy protections that the law promises, which can only be secured through broad coverage of the sensitive data about them and robust enforcement,” the groups add.

They are weighing in on the Federal Communications Commission's April order fining T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T for selling access to customers geolocation data to aggregators that resold the information to outside companies. (The FCC fined AT&T $57 million and Verizon $47 million. T-Mobile's $92 million fine included a $12 million fine for Sprint, which merged with T-Mobile in 2020.)

All three carriers are challenging the fines in court; T-Mobile brought suit in the D.C. Circuit, while AT&T sued in the 5th Circuit and Verizon sued in the 2nd Circuit.

T-Mobile argued in a November filing that the fine should be struck down for several reasons, including that the FCC hadn't previously said all location data should be treated as “customary proprietary network information,” and therefore subject to confidentiality rules under Section 222 of the Communications Act. Instead, according to T-Mobile, the FCC only required carriers to keep location data confidential when it was directly tied to voice services -- meaning data that would reveal customers' locations when they were talking on the telephone.

The location data at the center of the fine came from “location-based services” connected to non-voice services -- such as the Life Alert program, which sends medical help to people, or roadside assistance company AAA -- T-Mobile says.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and other advocates are asking the appellate court to reject that theory and rule that the phrase “customary proprietary network information” includes “all customer location data collected by a carrier, and not just data collected during an active voice service call.”

The groups add that T-Mobile's interpretation of the statute would undercut its purpose “by exposing extremely sensitive location data to misuse and abuse.”

“Congress tasked the FCC with holding each carrier accountable for protecting the data of its subscribers through Section 222; here, subscriber data was exposed in violation of the statute and ultimately and predictably that data was abused,” the groups write. “Against this backdrop, it is implausible to argue that Congress did not intend for the FCC to regulate precisely this type of misconduct by telecom companies.”

The agency initially proposed the fines in 2020, when it was led by Republicans. The move came around two years after it emerged 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 have said they no longer sell location data.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr -- who took over as chairman on Monday -- dissented from the decision to impose fines, arguing that the Federal Trade Commission was the appropriate agency to police the privacy practices at issue.

Carr also agreed with the carriers that the location data at the center of the fines hadn't previously been subject to confidentiality rules.

“Today’s FCC orders rest on a newfound definition of customer proprietary network information ... that finds no support in the Communications Act or FCC precedent,” he stated in April. “And without providing advance notice of the new legal duties expected of carriers (to the extent we could adopt those new duties at all), the FCC retroactively announces eye-popping forfeitures totaling nearly $200,000,000. These actions are inconsistent with the law and basic fairness.”