Both AT&T and Verizon sold their customers’ real-time location data to aggregators who resold it to almost anyone willing to pay. Both got fined. Both fought back. One of them just ran out of road.
On Aug. 17, the Supreme Court denied Verizon’s petition to recover the $47 million it paid the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the sale of customer location data, ending the carrier’s effort without explanation, according to QZ.
AT&T is in a different position. Its case took a different procedural path and it still has a live shot at recovering the $57 million it paid. That gap matters, and it didn’t happen by accident.
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Verizon’s FCC $47M location data fine
The fines go back to April 2024, when the FCC penalized four carriers a combined $196 million for selling customers’ location data to aggregators without meaningful consent.
T-Mobile was hit hardest at $80 million. AT&T paid $57 million. Verizon paid $47 million. Sprint paid $12 million.
The carriers didn’t just pay and move on. They paid under protest and went to court arguing the FCC’s enforcement process violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
The agency, they said, acted as judge and jury by imposing penalties through an administrative process rather than taking them to court.
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The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against the carriers on that argument in June. The majority held that the carriers weren’t denied a jury trial because they could have refused to pay and forced the government to sue them, at which point they could have demanded a jury.
Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter, writing that the carriers paid in good faith believing payment was mandatory and deserved to be made whole.
After losing that argument, Verizon filed an additional petition arguing the FCC had mischaracterized the nature of its forfeiture order to induce payment, then changed its position before the Supreme Court. The justices denied that petition without comment.
AT&T’s case went through the Fifth Circuit rather than the Second Circuit, and that procedural difference is everything.
The Fifth Circuit initially sided with AT&T and vacated the fine. The Supreme Court reversed that decision and sent the case back down. But in doing so, it left open the question of whether AT&T was misled into paying.
AT&T’s attorney Pratik Shah filed arguments at the Fifth Circuit on Aug. 7 pressing that exact point.
“The Commission’s every action culminating in its final forfeiture order required AT&T to pay the $57 million forfeiture immediately,” Shah wrote. “At the very least, the Court should order the Commission to issue AT&T a refund.”
AT&T is also separately arguing that the location data at issue wasn’t even covered by the FCC’s authority under Section 222 of the Communications Act. That’s a different argument entirely from the jury-trial question. If it succeeds, the fine would be vacated on the merits rather than on procedural grounds, according to Broadband Breakfast.
T-Mobile is also still fighting its $80 million penalty. Its argument is that selling device-location data didn’t violate U.S. telecommunications law. That case is on a separate track.
What was actually happening with customer location data
The dollar figures are one part of the story. What was actually done with the data is another.
Between 2014 and 2019, Verizon and AT&T sold real-time GPS location data for more than 140 million wireless subscribers to commercial aggregators, which resold that access through chains of buyers with virtually no oversight.
One aggregator, LocationSmart, left a public demo online that could pinpoint almost any mobile phone in North America.
The practical consequences were documented by journalists who paid $300 to a bounty hunter and watched him locate a test phone in real time using data that traced back to the carriers. Law enforcement agencies accessed the same data streams through commercial vendors rather than legal process.
The FCC told the carriers their practices were probably illegal in February 2020. The fines came four years later. That timeline is its own commentary on the speed of regulatory enforcement when major carriers are involved.
Both companies sold their customers’ real-time location data to aggregators who resold it to almost anyone willing to pay.Heather/Getty Images
What the Verizon verdict means for AT&T investors and customers
For Verizon, the financial hit is manageable.
The company reported second-quarter revenue of $34.3 billion and net income of $3.9 billion. A $47 million loss doesn’t move those numbers. What it does is close a chapter on one of the more significant privacy enforcement actions in wireless carrier history, with Verizon on the wrong side of it permanently.
For AT&T, the procedural advantage translates into a real financial opportunity.
Recovering $57 million isn’t transformative for a company of its size either. But winning on the merits of whether the FCC even had authority to issue the fine would be a different kind of victory. It would weaken the FCC’s enforcement posture against carriers for any future data-sharing disputes.
For customers, the case is a reminder of how location data moves once it leaves a carrier’s systems.
The carriers sold access. The aggregators resold access. The buyers included law enforcement, bail bondsmen and data brokers. The subscriber whose phone was generating that data had no practical visibility into any of it.
That is what $196 million in FCC fines was responding to, and the legal fight over who pays how much has run in parallel with that underlying reality ever since.
