The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) flexed its muscle on August 29, 2022, when it filed a lawsuit against Kochava, Inc., for harvesting, aggregating, collating, and then selling the “precise geolocation data” of millions of individuals in violation of the FTC Act.
FTC complaint: Data allows tracing individuals to and from sensitive locations
The FTC explains that Kochava acquires the location data, which originated from individuals’ mobile devices, from an array of data brokers. Kochava then creates customized data feeds and markets these feeds to commercial clients. Their client’s rationale for paying up to $25,000 per feed, according to the FTC, is to “know where consumers are and what they are doing.” Kochava is “then selling of geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices that can be used to trace the movements of individuals to and from sensitive locations.” The FTC identified “reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic violence shelters, and addiction recovery facilities” as the type of locations that could be identified as having been visited by individuals.
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