AT&T & Verizon Fined for Selling Customers' Location Data

The fight goes back to 2024, when the FCC fined the country's largest wireless carriers a combined $200 million after concluding they had sold access to customers' real-time location data without consent. AT&T was hit with about $57 million, and Verizon with roughly $47 million. T-Mobile and its former subsidiary Sprint accounted for the rest. All of them paid up but kept fighting, arguing that the way the FCC handed down those penalties was unconstitutional.

Their main complaint centered on the Seventh Amendment, which guarantees the right to a jury trial in certain cases. AT&T and Verizon said the FCC skipped that step by using its own in-house process to decide they broke the law and to set the fine, rather than taking them to court first. They had reason to be hopeful. The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit had sided with AT&T and tossed its fine, while the 2nd Circuit in New York upheld Verizon's. That split is a big part of why the Supreme Court agreed to step in.

Roberts and the majority were not convinced. The court reasoned that an FCC fine is not actually a binding order to pay. If a carrier refuses, the Justice Department has to file a lawsuit to collect, and that lawsuit comes with the jury trial the companies wanted. Because that option exists, the court found, the FCC's process does not strip anyone of their constitutional rights. The justices also rejected the idea that the reputational hit from a public fine counts as the kind of harm the Seventh Amendment is meant to cover.

Thomas saw it differently. In his dissent, he argued that the carriers paid in good faith because they reasonably believed the orders were obligatory, and that the government only started describing the fines as optional years later, once the companies had litigated the point effectively. He pointed out that no carrier had ever received a jury trial in this kind of enforcement action, so AT&T and Verizon had no real way of knowing they could simply ignore the bill and force the issue into court.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr welcomed the outcome, saying the agency is charged with enforcing the Communications Act and will keep holding companies accountable. Industry groups had warned that a win for the carriers could weaken how federal agencies enforce rules across data privacy, financial markets, and the environment, so the ruling lands as a relief for regulators well beyond telecom.

The dispute traces back to a more unsettling story than a billing fight. Investigators found that the carriers had sold location information to data aggregators, who then resold it to outside parties. One thread involved a Mississippi sheriff who used a service called Securus to track people's phones without a court order. Under the 1996 Telecommunications Act, carriers are legally required to protect this kind of information, and the FCC concluded they had handed it off without doing enough to keep it safe.

For everyday customers, the ruling does not put money back in anyone's pocket, and it does not undo the data sharing that started the whole thing. What it does is keep the FCC's enforcement powers intact and make them much harder to challenge in the future. The court did leave one question open, declining to decide whether carriers who already paid might have any claim to a refund.

There is also a loose end named T-Mobile. The company faced the largest single share of the original $200 million and lost its own challenge in a lower court. It was not directly part of this decision, but the legal logic the justices just approved applies to its case too, which quietly closes the same exit the carrier was counting on.

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