Facebook Is Not The Only One Guilty: Four Major Wireless Carriers Face Lawsuit From Extensive Exchanges of Personal Data

Facebook is a giant social media platform and since the latest revelation, we’ve been reminded at how scary and easy it is for our privacy to be invaded. We voluntarily submit those details, signed the agreement, only to be told one day that our data has been sold and traded for monetary gain.

Well, that said, Facebook is not the only platform capable of doing that because, unlike physical smuggling, you can’t barge into the HQ of social media platforms and demand them to prove that they haven’t done anything weird with your data. And at that point, you don’t even know how to best be convinced about it.

You now officially have a reason to be worried about sharing your data whatever your wireless provider is because four major companies are facing lawsuits. Of course, previously the companies have been facing scandals and reprimanded due to their actions of trading data. From law enforcement workers demanded E-911 location data (highly accurate location data, much better compare to GPS) to fake ones, little has been done about it.

Four major wireless carriers are charged with a proper lawsuit this time after violating Section 222 of the Federal Communications Act. The companies have been officially declared to have illegally traded, sold, and exchanged CPNI, consumer proprietary network information:

“Through its negligent and deliberate acts, including inexplicable failures to follow its own Privacy Policy, T-Mobile permitted access to Plaintiffs and Class Members’ CPI and CPNI,” the complaint against T-Mobile reads, referring to “confidential proprietary information” and “customer proprietary network information,” the latter of which includes location data.”

The world was shocked to find out their credit card details on Facebook is being sold, but to the giant network company owners, this doesn’t seem to be new. In fact, there has been very little done by lawmakers to regulate how privacy policy should be enforced, not just stated, for the safety of Internet users.

The FCC actually had a plan to employ a basic, but a stricter rule to protect privacy data, which is to have these giant network carriers getting transparent about how their data is used and sold. This was in 2016 and in within a year, the Congressional Review Act had the rules completely reduced to nothing. How ingenious, considering everyone was shocketh upon the revelation of Facebook privacy scandals.

We all know who the major companies are, but we’re going to list them anyways: AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile.