The United States Federal Trade Commission is taking action against two American data brokers accused of illegally trafficking people's sensitive location data. The agency says the data was used to monitor Americans in and around churches. military basesand doctors' offices, among other protected sites. It was sold not only for advertising purposes but also for other purposes including political campaigns and government uses immigration enforcement,
MobileWalla, a Georgia-based data broker that is said to have digitally tracked residents of domestic abuse shelters, has been accused by the agency of deliberately tracking protesters in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. In a court filing, the FTC says Mobilewala had attempted to expose the racial profiling of protesters by tracking their mobile devices at Hindu temples and black churches, for example.
The FTC also accused Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Ventel of harvesting and exploiting consumers' location data without their consent, alleging that the company used that data to make false inferences about health decisions and religious beliefs. Done to put.
According to the FTC, Gravy Analytics collected more than 17 billion location signals from approximately one billion mobile devices per day. It has reportedly sold access to that data to federal law enforcement agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Gravy Analytics could not immediately be reached for comment.
A spokesperson for Mobilewala says the company's privacy policies are constantly evolving, adding: “While we disagree with many of the FTC's allegations and implications that Mobilewala tracks and targets individuals based on sensitive categories, we are satisfied.” “We are confident that the solution will allow us to continue providing valuable insights to businesses in a way that respects and protects consumer privacy.”
“This data can be used to identify and target consumers based on their religion,” the FTC says. The agency says location data collected by both companies “makes it possible to identify where individual consumers lived, worked, and worshiped, thus suggesting the mobile device user's religion and routines and providing information about the user's Recognize friends and families.”
According to the two agreements, which must be finalized in court before they can take effect, Gravy Analytics and Mobilewala are barred from collecting sensitive location data from consumers and must delete historical data they collected on millions of Americans. Mobilewala will be banned from obtaining location data and other sensitive information from online auctions, known as real-time bid exchanges, marketplaces where advertisers compete to instantly deliver ads to targeted consumers. This case is the first time the FTC has directly policed the collection of data from an ad exchange.