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- cross-posted to:
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a fine of $92M and it isnt a class action suit. i dont even get my $1.08 in the mail for being violated.
Fines are criminal. Lawsuits are civil.
Fines are punishment for breaking the law, and are paid to the state. Civil lawsuits seek relief by those impacted by the defendant, and can range from monetary relief to injunction compelling the defendant to take or cease certain actions.
Outside of felonies, civil litigation is much worse than criminal. When the government goes after you criminally, they can fine you, jail you, or kill you, and that’s about it. When they go after you in civil court, they can do much worse.
I work in municipal government, and we frequently do both. For example, if you build a gate across a public street (happens more than you would think), we can’t just send you to criminal court, because once they’ve fined you, the case is over and there’s still a gate blocking the road.
Instead we send you to criminal court for the fine AND take you to civil court to get an injunction requiring you to remove the gate (or to put a lein on your property if we had it removed ourselves and you haven’t paid us back).
got it. so we are still being violated. D :
The Carriers also argue that the Commission misinterpreted the Communications Act, miscalculated the penalties, and violated the Seventh Amendment by not affording them a jury trial.
You poor things! Were you forced into binding arbitration by a bullshit ToS? Besides, if nobody at a corporation ever goes to jail for these crimes, they sure as fuck don’t deserve a jury trial.
Once you have a bad verdict you have nothing to lose so just challenge the whole trial
I’m surprised that they would want one.
I’m not sure it the 7th ammendment would even apply as it’s intended for civil court only, not criminal
I doubt that they do. They are most likely clutching at straws trying to get the verdict overturned.
It’s a jury of their peers, so it would have to be 12 other telecom companies, right? I don’t think we have that many here. 🤔
If you count MVNOs I bet we do. And that definitely wouldn’t a conflict of interest.
The fundamental issue is that a cell service provider has a natural monopoly. There can never be many of them, so there isn’t going to be much competition.
It’s also a pain to switch identifiers — changing a phone number is painful — so a cell provider is in possession of a unique identifier linked to location spanning many years. That’s valuable data.
Both a SIM and the phone’s radio in which it is inserted have unique identifiers visible to a carrier.
If one gets prepaid service in cash, it’s possible to not directly link those identifiers to an identity.
You can probably get your phone service from an SIP provider, maybe route the SIP traffic and all other data service through a VPN. That’ll obscure most unique information from the cell provider, and the SIP provider won’t even have geolocatable IP information, just a VPN endpoint. The SIP and VPN market is competitive; no natural monopoly there.
It’s still probably possible to link a cell ID to identity if one can cross-reference enough databases that do contain one’s personal identity linked to a location at a given time. Maybe if one gets a sufficiently-cheap cell modem that it can be swapped along with the SIM at regular intervals, so that there’s only a year-long period or whatever over which over which a cell service provider has a unique identity. If the phone number is linked to the SIP provider instead of a cell provider, then the barriers to swapping cell service across accounts go away.
I suppose one has to deal with the risk that the firmware on the modem might phone home with location data.
And, of course, all bets are off if an app running on one’s computer or cell phone can just obtain a unique identifier and location at a given time and phone home with that and let the app vendor sell it.
In the US at least, porting (transferring) a number from one provider to another takes (usually) ~5 minutes. You can even do it to/from landlines. The carrier/customer service might balk and try to keep you but a little persistence and it’s done. It’s been this way years before I got my first phone number, and that was almost 20 years ago now.
Everything is legal if the only penalty is a fine.
Tired of the bullshit from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon. I’ve been thinking about Cape more and more every day.
(Yes, I understand that the radios used by Cape are licensed by the other carriers, but their privacy-focused infrastructure is what I’m really looking for.)
Should just be public. I think it’s clear now that private companies running utilities is awful. Reagan and Thatcher can roll in their graves while I piss on their neoliberalism and “public private partnerships”.
$99 per month?! How much money is T-Mobile making off selling location data? Their currently advertised prepaid plans run from $40-$60.
Actually, they start at $15
Seriously. Mint is owned by T-Mobile and plans start at $15/mo.
I’m happy to spend $3 a month for a privacy-respecting email account over a free Gmail, but $100 instead of $15 is a bit much.
My post paid tmo plan is $60/mo. Why tf is a prepaid $60 too? Maybe I’m out of touch, but prepaid used to be like the most bare bones plans available
You are, in fact, out of touch. Unless you need phone financing (which should be done through the phone manufacturer, not the carrier, to avoid lock-in) there is absolutely no reason for the typical person to be using a postpaid plan.
I recently moved from an AT&T Business plan (which was grandfathered) to the tune of $95 (but discounted from $125! what a deal) + tax + fees (and a laptop data plan for $20 + taxes + fees), that I had for true unlimited data and the absolute top priority level not found anywhere else from AT&T (unless you were a first responder using FirstNet), to Visible at $30 a month all-in (with $5 discount for 12 months). Verizon priority data, unlimited everything, prepaid. My folks are on the $15 tmo connect plan and have unl/unl/5GB of data (hard capped but they use around 1GB so no big concern). My second line is thru Tello at $6.
I used to be a big geek into this, and it pains me when people are like ‘I need the best plan’ and get absolutely taken to the cleaners when a) they rarely ‘need’ the best and b) the best is nearly always available for less.
You could be paying $25 less every month and get the exact same service. Or cut some corners and save $45.
Cape uses the US Cellular network, which was just acquired by T-Mobile this month. I wonder what will happen with this service. They may not let Cape continue with their own backend infrastructure.
