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Background for this topic.
A fine is a monetary penalty imposed by a competent authority or court for violating a law, regulation, or legally binding requirement. In information security and privacy, it may follow inadequate safeguards for personal data, unlawful processing, failure to meet required reporting or record-keeping duties, or non-compliance with sector-specific controls. The legal basis, maximum amount, and factors such as severity, duration, negligence, cooperation, and remediation vary by jurisdiction; a fine is generally punitive rather than compensation for affected parties.
For security practitioners, a fine signals that controls and security decisions may be examined as evidence of compliance. Maintain documented risk assessments, access reviews, patching decisions, supplier oversight, logging, and retention practices, especially where they protect regulated data. During an incident, preserve relevant records and establish an accurate timeline for containment, notification, and remediation. Privacy requirements such as data minimization and retention limits can therefore be security controls as well as legal obligations. A fine does not by itself establish that a particular attack or breach occurred.
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA are being fined for sharing location data. They plan to appeal the decision, which is the culmination of a four-year investigation into how carriers sold customer data to third parties.
Central YMCA was fined £7,500 for a data breach exposing HIV information of support program participants, prompting the ICO to call for stronger privacy protections for people with HIV
Some of America’s biggest wireless carriers illegally sold customer location, says FCC
Carriers claim real culprits are getting away with it - the data brokers The FCC on Monday fined four major US telcos almost $200 million for "illegally" selling subscribers' location information to data brokers.…
Commission Approves Long-Anticipated Fines for Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and SprintThe Federal Communications Commission announced Monday that it is slapping the leading U.S. cellular providers with nearly $200 million in fines for selling customers' location data to third parties without their consent, following years of warnings from lawmakers about the apparent privacy abuses.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today levied fines totaling nearly $200 million against the four major carriers -- including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon -- for illegally sharing access to customers' location information without consent.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined the largest U.S. wireless carriers almost $200 million for sharing their customers' real-time location data without their consent. [...]