The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing data broker Kochava Inc, alleging that it sold geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices that can be used to trace individuals’ movements to and from “sensitive locations.”
The agency announced the lawsuit in a press release on Aug. 29.
It claims that data from Idaho-based Kochava is formatted to “reveal people’s visits to reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic violence shelters, and addiction recovery facilities.”
According to its website, Kochava is the “industry leader for mobile app attribution and mobile app analytics.”
The FTC, which is an independent agency of the federal government, says the location data broker “provides its customers massive amounts of precise geolocation data collected from consumers’ mobile devices” and that through its services, customers can “[l]icense premium data,” including the “precision location” of a consumer’s mobile device….