U.S. wireless carriers face $200 million in FCC fines for mishandling customer data

Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T can definitely hear the FCC now. 

The nation's largest mobile providers are facing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in fines after the Federal Communications Commission determined the companies didn't adequately protect customers' location data. At issue was the practice of selling customers' real-time location data to third parties — data which then ended up in the hands of bounty hunters, debt collectors, and other questionable parties. 

The news, reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows a Jan. 31 announcement by the FCC that at least one phone carrier had violated federal privacy protectionsAccording to Reuters, the FCC is set to propose fines of $200 million in total for the four mobile carriers tomorrow.  Read more...