The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) acted legally when it issued nearly $200 million in fines against telecommunications companies accused of sharing access to consumers’ location data without their consent.

In an 8-1 decision, the high court held that the fines levied against AT&T and Verizon in April 2024 were legal because they did not violate the companies’ rights to a jury trial. The telecom giants had argued that the agency’s process for imposing fines as a standalone entity is unconstitutional for that reason.

Verizon had been fined nearly $47 million and AT&T more than $57 million. T-Mobile, which also was fined, previously sued to overturn the $92 million penalty the FCC levied against it and its subsidiary Sprint. In August 2025 a federal appeals court ruled that T-Mobile could not escape the fine.

The Trump administration had backed the FCC’s position and, apart from Justice Clarence Thomas, the high court agreed.

“The Commission’s factual findings are not conclusive,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion. “It thus does not offend the Constitution for the Commission to issue forfeiture orders without the involvement of a jury.”

In addition to not obtaining consent for sharing consumers’ location data, the FCC said the companies did not take “reasonable measures” to protect the information. The agency alleged that the companies sold the data to aggregators who then peddled it to third-party data brokers.

“Each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained,” the agency said in a press release at the time.  

AT&T and Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

When the fines were first issued in 2024, an AT&T spokesperson said in a statement that the FCC’s order “lacks both legal and factual merit.” 

“It unfairly holds us responsible for another company’s violation of our contractual requirements to obtain consent, ignores the immediate steps we took to address that company’s failures, and perversely punishes us for supporting life-saving location services like emergency medical alerts and roadside assistance that the FCC itself previously encouraged,” the statement said.

A Verizon spokesperson said at the time that the company is “deeply committed to protecting customer privacy. In this case, when one bad actor gained unauthorized access to information relating to a very small number of customers, we quickly and proactively cut off the fraudster, shut down the program, and worked to ensure this couldn't happen again.”

The FCC fined the companies after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) released the results of an investigation showing a government contractor that bought the data then established a “self-service website” law enforcement used to secure location data for any phone in the country without a court order.

“No one who signed up for a cell plan thought they were giving permission for their phone company to sell a detailed record of their movements to anyone with a credit card,” Wyden said in a statement at the time.