I think the rule should be three times whatever they made before expenses. So the gross income generated should be tripled and that should be the fine.
Fines need to be the sum total profit made for the period they made the money, they shouldn’t be allowed or rewarded to make a dime while invalidating our rights
Whats more is we will pay the fines as the cost is passed on to us. It's like how cops violate our rights and rare cases they get sued, tax payers pay it. We pay for their salaries , benefits, and fk ups all to violate us What a racket
It's because you have to lease usage of a network. It's not like a Gameboy where all the hardware, software, and information are physically attached to the device. This is why cars are running into this problem, since now they use Internet for various services.
Wait a minute, are you telling me you think you're the consumer? You're the product. Did you even opt out of data monetization with your ISP? I did with both my landline internet provider and Verizon my cell provider. The vast majority of people are the product, companies are the customer. I take every safeguard I can. I tell company's not to sell my data, I pay Incogni to deal with data brokers, I'm on the do not call, and do not mail lists. I actively follow up on consumer issues with the FTC and AG. The problem is 99% of Americans are to lazy and dumb to do so. I'm a little bitter the common masses have got us here, at least I know it's not my fault.
Nowhere near enough of a penalty. If you make billions and get fined millions, it is just the cost of doing business and companies will continue to do nefarious things
Please the government does this too. This isn't a fine. It is the mafia(government) demanding their cut of the profits. Look up DMV sellers customer data.
@@steveschaps2178 which is why the penalty for companies breaking the law should be fines against the execs and controlling majority shareholder(s), AND, Criminal Asset Forfeiture applied to the company itself as the company was the tool used to comit the crimes.
Quit whining and do something about it. They have publicly listed boards of directors. You have Google. Their location data is sold. Be the change you'd like to see.
The cell companies should be required to delete the location info after 72 hours, without selling it. Think of the memory wasted storing location data for everyone with a cell phone, and transmitting it from cell towers to a central office.
@@robertball3578 Can you say more about this concept of waste. I am suggesting that when you and I get a third party to pay for a thing that beings benefit to each, that might work out. My experience is that the model does not work over time. I struggle to comprehend why. In the model I am thinking about, If "I" am business and "you" are government and the "third party" is the voting public that pays for products and services, how is it that the model does not work over time. The descriptions of systemic failure seem to be about transparency, or an ability of the "third party" to request(demand) an explanation of system function and control mechanisms.
Sorry, partly disagree. If I own a company I should be able to do what I want with it. The failure of anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws has gotten us to this point. Both Google and Apple use SDK to write Their apps. Anyone should be able to make an OS that can use both parties apps, but as I said government has failed.
Yes, true! A violation of the constitution. Built-in search and surveillance with illegal tying agreements by not allowing an easy opt out. Opt out is likely buried in your billing statement.
If I'm a company, and I know something is illegal but the profits outweigh the fine, then why not do it? Nothing will change unless they start giving employees jail time that break the law.
I just don't understand how criminal codes no longer apply as soon as someone claims they were an "employee" of a "corporation". We don't give gang members that benefit, so why do corporate "employees" get away with actions that blatantly break the law? Ignorance of the law isn't an excuse unless you are an employee of a government or corporation, it seems.
@@Garth2011 and that should be irrelevant, they should be held responsible for every action by any employee that benefits the company rather than the employee alone as if the CEOs had comitted the crime themselves, and the company itself should be treated as a tool of the crime and subject to mandatory Criminal Asset Forfeiture upon conviction
Our Government will never do this, because then they'd have to face criminal charges as well for pressuring them to do it and buying the info to spy on Americans without a warrant
The government will never stop sueing companies because it's just another tax. The victims don't get the money, and will pay more as the cost of fines gets passed on.
Fines don't mean anything to me. The bastards already sold myinfo and I sure as heck am NOT going to be compensated for what I GAVE THEM ! Meaningless.
Worked for the City of Portland, Transportation. We had a contractor at the time/now head of traffic signals, that installed Bluetooth detectors at the traffic signals that picked up every bluetooth enabled device passing and tracked them along a corridor. Did not need to use any cellular provider as every smart phone enabled Bluetooth by default. Now, they did that to study traffic flows along the corridor, but anyone can do exactly the same thing and with a Bluetooth detector in their establishments, those people and vehicles can actually be identified. (Each Bluetooth enabled device has a unique identifier!) So, it doesn't take a cellular company to do that.
Fines or not, they'll keep doing it as long as it continues to be profitable- ideally, they should be required to remit payments received back to the individuals whose information was sold!
That’s why when I travel, I would get a call from a spoofed phone calls/text with the exact area code I was visiting. I knew they were doing this, and no point in calling to complain because their low-level customer service reps don’t know or understand jack. Why aren’t those who were pestered the ones receiving compensation?!
I wish our representatives would realize that scams and other dishonest actions like this effectively break the social contract. Not only does it appear to be foolish to have any faith in a company you do business with but there are effectively no repercussions if they do you wrong.
Chump change, a small drop in the bucket of the cost of doing business for them. This fine needs to be 10x to effectively discourage them from doing so again, with ever increasing penalties for continued sales. And no, an amendment to their TOS's saying "you agree to let us" should not be allowable.
Disagree. The penalty for spying on users and selling the generated data have to be jail time for the CEOs and controlling majority owners AND the company itself forfeited and disintegrated as any other "Tool of a crime"
So who is getting the money from these suits? Shouldn't the money be paid to the costumers? Hopefully the money is not going to the government, to be used for something that maybe the taxpayers or voters do not want it used for!
Well .. judging from the conglomo that runs my electricity, when they were forced to pay a settlement to the consumers, I believe everyone got like a $3 credit added to their bill.
gathering so much information should not be legal, much less sale it. Also, fines are just a cost of business for these corporations. Laws need to change so C suite people face jail time when this kind of crap happens. Nothing short of that will fix this.
So the govt fined them for violating your privacy and get to pocket the money, but didn't do anything to prevent them from forcing you to agree in order to get service.
Consumer consent needs to be ITEMIZED. This means no more "well you hit the agree button" on a 900 page document. Companies will now have to verbally say what they are and will not do line by line. That should shut down fraud real quick.
And yet, people vote for politicians that pass laws that allows the government to surveil you without a warrant. Proportionality is an important concept.
..which will be paid for by customers, 100%. 0.2% isn't even hardly a rounding error, requiring the most dedicated forensic accounting to find hiding inside a balance sheet. Yet another problem unsolved by government, but the cost of living went up.
I remember as a kid thinking that AOL was the actual internet. Oh the good old dial up days and then when the parents would pick up the landline it would disconnect your connection to the internet.
I love watching companies violate my privacy rights to get mega rich, then pay lint-covered pocket change as 'punishment'. I've lost track of how many times this has happened, now. If corporations are people, we need to start dissolving corporate charters (since we can't imprison a corporate charter, and nobody responsible ever does time). This is just ridiculous. I've known for years that you could, let's say, be a bounty hunter, have your target's cell #, and call the carrier to pay ~$300 or so for a current location. And I've always despised that thought. Now here we are, seeing that kind of stuff get not-punished.
I do believe in Europe it's against the law and Apple, Samsung, etc can't force customers to agree to using and sharing/selling their data without consent. The lawmakers here in the states don't care.
I owned a T-Mobile store and 2 Verizon stores. We were required to have printed agreement forms in case of electric outage or if it was requested, which never happened. The next time you get a phone or are in a phone store, ask for the printed form. The companies automatically send every store a stack when there are changes to the agreement. The coordination of cell carriers with the government since FOIA in 2001 has always irked me.But...now I'm a deejay and am not part of tattling on citizens.
It will take a very serious event for these companies and politicians to realize that if you deny people recourse within the law, they may seek recourse outside the law.
Apart from commercial entities using geo tagging, geo fencing and geo caching location data, this is what formed the basis of Dinesh D'Sousa's documentary 2000 Mules. If you've watched the documentary, it shows exactly how the data tracks you through your cel phone. Lesson here is, technology is not your friend even if it has its' uses. We've been sold on the idea that all of this is good for us, but the more we use it and learn about it, the less that seems to be true.
They need to be fined an amount that makes it not profitable to do this, (as in billion dollar fines, not millions). Only then will they stop. This fine was just a 'cost of business' fee and a pass to continue to break the law.
We need for this to be outlawed, plain and simple. Congress do your job. I got 18 unsolicited yesterday. I have my location information off and use a stand alone GPS.
Even with GPS turned off, all cell towers in the area can triangulate your general position, and not just your service provider either. The other providers might not know who you are, but they know which phones are where and when.
I get up to 36 phone calls on both my house phone and cell phone Monday through Saturday from 7:30 am - 7:30 pm. They won't take you off their list though they say they will. Many of these calls are from the SAME PERSON several times per week. I now answer with a variety of voices. Without telling them who I am I ask them how they got my info. They all say from a public data base! Almost none say who they're working for until asked and many hang up at that point. I call it dial a scam. Same person calls from any of several one-time numbers, with a different name, and different scam. How can we shut down these call centers?
One of the most amazing things about todays tech is how lax we are. In ww2, posession of a short wave radio would find people arrested for espionage in some circumstances. But a cell phone, with easily 100x the tech... draws a yawn on all fronts.
Its a kick in the teeth for what we pay in service. I'll never forget landing in Texas and that same day getting HEB adds for the first time. Its obvious these phone and apps are tracking location for targeted advertising. Even my spam calls reflect local area codes between states.
Does anyone else feel like this is a money grab by a government entity? This could have been stopped a long time ago, but it seems like the government agency just sits back and lets it happen for extended periods of time until they can justify a huge fine.
This became an issue to the elected officials when it was used to show the same people making hundreds of stops at the same outside ballot box. Suddenly it was an issue. Government never does something for you it is always for them. If it was for real the fines would go to the people involved but it will go to fund the government and nice new offices.
Turn your location off and you don't have to worry so much about it if you don't live in an area flooded with cell phone towers. In rural areas they're lucky to know a 25 mile area that you could be in
I love your thoughts that AOL never thought about selling their data. I worked at AOL in the mid 2000's, and we were well aware of the value. The company policy was that to sell that access would be to violate the member's trust and ultimately cost more than could be made with that information.
Consent for reasonable operational requirements should be included in the blanket agreement. That contract, which no one reads, requires an army of attorneys to dissect for comprehension, and a handful of court cases decide on clause interpretation. Consent for non-operational requirements, such as data sharing, should require a clear and distinct opt-in requirement, not an opt-out option following automatic enrollment.
That is a freaking shame. I used to work for AT&T in wireline here in California. If confidential subscriber information was sold, the person who did it would be immediately fired and quite possibly prosecuted. Now they do it willy nilly with no regard to privacy or federal laws.
I was watching C-span showing a senate committee questioning a number of consumer advocates. A senator asked how to avoid allowing a regulated industry capturing the government body (regulator) that is tasked with overseeing the industry. I did not hear a workable answer. The concept of "fairness" seems to be very different from the point of view of opposing sides of a transaction. Each side would consider it "fair" if a coin flip decided the price such a way that heads I win, tails you loose.
Companies should have been required to refund the monthly bill for every affected customer for every month this happened. That would drive the point home.
The fine was likely to be lower than the actual money they made from selling the data, meaning they won't stop doing it and now know there is a small extra tax for doing it.
@@msromike123 It's a multibillion dollar market for cellphone location data alone and they were all fined a few million for more than just the location data.
A crime that is merely fined a minor amount is just the cost of doing business. They're still making tons of money off of this illegal shit. Make no mistake, they absolutely calculated this cost into their decision to do this.
Tracking has been used to define the perimeter of military bases and the number of personnel present. When all the phones present in an area are aggregated, the data map can reveal a lot more than individual points.
Imagine cell phone location data being sold to digital billboards on the road. So you have personalized individual ads on your drive when road traffic is light.
This also causes problems for people who are/have been harrassed by ex spouses, former employer, other employess who are in 'phone' industy, or police who have the wrong 'john doe' ..and just general harrassment over telecommunications...
This is a fineprint scenario and rolling contract update on the part of cellphone companies. I’m sure you have received emails or letters from your cellphone provider or ISP about updates regarding your personal information. Similar to what apps on your cellphone have written into their legal jargon, cellphones will change the terms of usage about information sharing and, like with apps, give you no choice to opt out IF you want to their service. Companies do this under the guise of “to better serve you” or “to provide the best experience”. In reality, they’re making money off of trafficking your privacy.
Froiegn adversaries tracking people is extremely important if they target people with security clearances to track them in order to blackmail or recruit them in order to obtain classified information.
99% of the time I leave my G.P.S location turned off on my phone. But every time, I put my phone into airplane mode. I notice my gps locator flickers on and off!!! every time now!
Not only that they have to let you opt out but that they have to make it easy to do so and they have to explain why and how not opting out can be detrimental to you. In addition there ought to be something in place to prevent them from retaliating against you for opting out so that they can’t raise prices on you or diminish your service in any way because you opted out.
It will never stop. The fines are revenue to the gov't and the fines are small enough that they are merely a business expense meaning the FCC are in on it.
I think the second point raised by Steve that getting consent without the ability to opt out is just as bad as selling data without consent. This already happened with Roku for example, they pushed out an update to terms of use and did not allow the existing tv owner to decline, disabling tv use until they accept the new terms.
with social media and people posting photos or videos every where they eat or shop does selling the info put out anything the people don’t put out themselves? Or is there information such as ssn, banking info and such?
Fines? What? How does that fix things for the customer? Replace my phone with a new one, on another carrier. I get more privacy (or a new phone every year), and they lose me as a customer.
I always wonder what happens to that FCC (and similar) fine money when they were not the ones harmed. The customers are the ones violated here -- do they ever see any of that money?...
How is my search history, purchase history, and travel history valuable to anyone? I mean, I NEVER purchase anything from intrusive ads. I truly mean, NEVER.
