Data broker’s “staggering” sale of sensitive info exposed in unsealed FTC filing

Absolutely insane.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill recently unsealed a court filing, an amended complaint that perhaps contains the most evidence yet gathered by the FTC in its long-standing mission to crack down on data brokers allegedly "substantially" harming consumers by invading their privacy.

According to the FTC, Kochava's customers, ostensibly advertisers, can access this data to trace individuals' movements—including to sensitive locations like hospitals, temporary shelters, and places of worship, with a promised accuracy within "a few meters"—over a day, a week, a month, or a year.

Beyond that, the FTC alleged that Kochava also makes it easy for advertisers to target customers by categories that are "often based on specific sensitive and personal characteristics or attributes identified from its massive collection of data about individual consumers."

These "audience segments" allegedly allow advertisers to conduct invasive targeting by grouping people not just by common data points like age or gender, but by "places they have visited," political associations, or even their current circumstances, like whether they're expectant parents.

Instead, Kochava "actively promotes its data as a means to evade consumers’ privacy choices," the FTC alleged.

Further, the FTC alleged that there are no real ways for consumers to opt out of Kochava's data marketplace, because even resetting their mobile advertising IDs—the data point that's allegedly most commonly used to identify users in its database—won't stop Kochava customers from using its products to determine "other points to connect to and securely solve for identity.”

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