FTC Locks Horns with Kochava over Location Data

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against attribution and measurement solutions company Kochava, claiming its sells sensitive geolocation data from mobile devices. Kochava says it's fully compliant and is now suing the FTC in return.

The suits have now been joined by a class action submitted by California resident David Greenley, claiming that Kochava 'collected, sold, licensed, and transferred' precise location data collected from phones without the owners' consent.

The FTC claim raises the spectre of location data being used to track the movements of individuals to and from sensitive locations, including 'reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic violence shelters, and addiction recovery facilities' - exposing them to potential stigma, job loss, physical violence and/or prosecution - for example following the recent demise of abortion judgement Roe vs Wade. Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said: 'Where consumers seek out health care, receive counseling, or celebrate their faith is private information that shouldn't be sold to the highest bidder'.

Kochava sells profiled audiences for advertising purposes, based on location and behaviour data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices and making use of unique device identification numbers: individuals are often unaware of the collection of this data and have no control over its use. The FTC alleges that Kochava's products allow purchasers to identify and track specific mobile device users, using it without restriction; and says that it examined a sample including precise, timestamped location data from more than 61m unique devices in the previous week.

Kochava said in an email to Yahoo Finance that it 'operates consistently and proactively in compliance with all rules and laws' and that the FTC appears to be trying 'to get a small, bootstrapped company to agree to a settlement' so as to set a precedent for cases across the ad tech industry.

US privacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently suggested that data collected for advertising purposes increasingly runs the risk of being used by law enforcement to trace movements of individuals for prosecution - including visits to abortion clinics - see www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/how-ad-tech-became-cop-spy-tech How Ad Tech Became Cop Spy Tech.

Some content from www.mediapost.com . FTC documents at www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/ftc-v-kochava-inc .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.