Feds crack down hard on selling of personal data without consent

The US government is coming down hard on a data broker accused of selling consumers’ detailed location histories without their consent, highlighting privacy regulators’ growing focus on a sensitive and revealing form of personal information.

The US government is coming down hard on a data broker accused of selling consumers’ detailed location histories without their consent, highlighting privacy regulators’ growing focus on a sensitive and revealing form of personal information. For the first time ever, the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday it was banning a company from selling or licensing people’s precise geolocation data as part of a settlement with InMarket Media, a Texas-based data aggregator. InMarket had allegedly gathered a vast trove of consumer location data from mobile apps and told users that the data would be used to improve the apps’ services — but did not disclose that it would also be used for targeted advertising, according to an FTC complaint. The FTC alleged that InMarket sliced and diced the location data to produce specific groups of consumers that it could then market to advertisers looking to reach certain categories of people, such as “Christian church goers,” “parents of preschoolers,” high-school students and children who are homeschooled, among others. But InMarket never got those people’s informed consent before using that data for advertising, according to the FTC. In addition to banning InMarket from selling or licensing the data, it also forced the company to either delete all of its previously collected location data or to take steps to anonymize it.