FTC Says Data Brokers Unlawfully Tracked Protesters and US Military Personnel

The United States Federal Trade Commission is taking action against two American data brokers accused of unlawfully trafficking in people’s sensitive location data. The data was used, the agency says, to track Americans in and around churches, military bases, and doctors’ offices, among other protected sites. It was sold not only for advertising purposes but also for political campaigns and government uses, including immigration enforcement.

Mobilewalla, a Georgia-based data broker that’s said to have digitally tracked the residents of domestic abuse shelters, is accused by the agency of purposefully tracking protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. In a court filing, the FTC says Mobilewalla attempted to unmask the protesters’ racial identities by tracking their mobile devices to, for example, Hindu temples and Black churches.

The FTC also accused Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel of harvesting and exploiting consumers’ location data without consent, alleging that the company used that data to unfairly infer health decisions and religious beliefs.

According to the FTC, Gravy Analytics collected over 17 billion location signals from approximately a billion mobile devices daily. 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 be immediately reached for comment.

A spokesperson for Mobilewalla says the company’s privacy policies are constantly evolving, adding: “While we disagree with many of the FTC’s allegations and implications that Mobilewalla tracks and targets individuals based on sensitive categories, we are satisfied that the resolution will allow us to continue providing valuable insights to businesses in a manner that respects and protects consumer privacy.”

“This data can be used to identify and target consumers based on their religion,” the FTC says. The location data collected by the two companies makes it possible, the agency says, to “identify where individual consumers lived, worked, and worshipped, thus suggesting the mobile device user’s religion and routine and identifying the user’s friends and families.”

According to the two settlements, which must be finalized in court before they would go into effect, Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla are barred from collecting sensitive location data from consumers and must delete the historical data they gathered on millions of Americans. Mobilewalla would be banned from acquiring location data and other sensitive information from online auctions known as real-time bidding exchanges, marketplaces where advertisers compete to instantaneously deliver ads to targeted consumers. This case marks the first time the FTC has moved to police the collection of data directly from an ad exchange.