Data Broker's 'Staggering' Sale of Sensitive Info Exposed in Unsealed FTC Filing (arstechnica.com) 30
One of the world's largest mobile data brokers, Kochava, has lost its battle to stop the Federal Trade Commission from revealing what the FTC has alleged is a disturbing, widespread pattern of unfair use and sale of sensitive data without consent from hundreds of millions of people. ArsTechnica: 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. The FTC has accused Kochava of violating the FTC Act by amassing and disclosing "a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States.
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. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.
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. Or advertisers can allegedly combine data points to target highly specific audience segments like "all the pregnant Muslim women in Kochava's database," the FTC alleged, or "parents with different ages of children."
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. Kochava's products can also provide a "360-degree perspective" on individuals, unveiling personally identifying information like their names, home addresses, phone numbers, as well as sensitive information like their race, gender, ethnicity, annual income, political affiliations, or religion, the FTC alleged.
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. Or advertisers can allegedly combine data points to target highly specific audience segments like "all the pregnant Muslim women in Kochava's database," the FTC alleged, or "parents with different ages of children."
Big Brother's Garage Sale: Your Data on Aisle 5 (Score:5, Funny)
But fear not, noble denizens of the net, for the FTC has donned their shining armor, wielding the mighty subpoena sword, to tell us what we've suspected all along. That our beloved data broker friends are the maestros orchestrating a symphony of surveillance, fine-tuning the art of 'personalized advertising' to a level where even the Minority Report's pre-cogs would say, "Whoa, that's a bit much."
Let's give a round of silent, monitored applause to Kochava for achieving the dream: making it so you don't just visit websites, but the websites visit you, your home, your favorite coffee shops, and that awkward visit to the 'unique' gift store you thought no one knew about. Bravo!
And? What of it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And? What of it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reveal is of evidence submitted to a court where the FTC currently has a case pending against Kochava seeking a permanent injunction to stop them from selling consumer data. If the judge decides in favor of the FTC, Kochava is instantly out of business.
So yes, it may actually change something.
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Again nothing will change.
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Oh you are one of those "we've tried nothing and we are all out of ideas" people.
No, I am pretty sure we have tried the "Sue the Data Broker into Oblivion" trick before and it didn't work.
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If they're out of business then the rest of their industry will find something else to do.
They're evil not stupid.
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Kochava is instantly out of business.
Some people live in a fantasy world. This will be litigated over the next 10 years. Meanwhile it will be business as usual at Kochava. If by any chance FTC makes any headway in slowing down Kochava in any form, we will have a faithful politician come to it's rescue and abolish any rules just like it was done for net neutrality.
The US constitution should be rewritten. Instead of "We the people" it should read "We the people with money". It's been 30 years that we've been saying that we are being spied upon.
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Do you vote?
If not, why not? Voting is the most basic way to express your desires.
If yes, why? You don't believe in the system.
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Do you vote?
If not, why not? Voting is the most basic way to express your desires. If yes, why? You don't believe in the system.
Do YOU believe in the system?
I believe in the system as it was before the Powell memo kicked off the still-evolving process under which we increasingly have government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Of course, corporations are persons before the law, which makes them 'people', so it's all OK, right? /sarc
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I believe the system is imperfect but fixable.
If you don't like it now you would've hated it 100 years ago and wouldn't even recognize it 150+ years ago.
Yes, corporations = people away a truly horrible ruling but I believe it will be overturned by a later court. The era of the robber barons makes today look truly enlightened. You know what they did to strikers back then? They shot them.
We should just give up because there are some bad things? No, I don't believe that. Evil wins when good men do nothing
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Fair enough. The system may be fixable. But with global warming and all the fallout it's bringing, I'm not confident we'll have the resources to devote to re-shaping our institutions. I'm afraid we'll be too busy putting out fires, both literal and figurative. I'm also skeptical that anything short of revolution can fix the system.
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You may be right about all that. Only time will tell. But I'll go to my grave believing doing nothing / giving up only guarantees things will not only not improve but get even worse.
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Both are important. There is no one true way to fix things. Every form of pressure has value.
I've cast a winning vote for president only twice in my life and I regret one of those. That doesn't stop me from voting every time. The only vote I missed I was in the middle of moving and my registration got botched up.
Re:And? What of it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not illegal (Score:2)
Despite all the shocked posturing, it's obvious none of this is illegal.
What's the end-game here? Will the FTC demand Google and Apple have separate sensitive-information consent forms, when subscribers create a cloud account? Maybe, they'll demand the display of consent forms each time one visits a hospital? Will they demand that places of worship, hospitals and abortion clinics, be deleted from the tracking database?
The lack of privacy on the internet has been a painful thorn on cloud services for
Staggering? Really? (Score:2)
Companies, governments, and any other institution which can't literally be sent to prison must be assumed to be doing whatever they can to maximize their power and profit, up to a fairly significant level of illegality and abhorrence. To pretend otherwise is to be drinking the capitalist system's Kool-aid.
This isn't because humans are bad people (though many are), it's because this
Surely this is a Chinese company? (Score:2)
Surely they must be Chinese, working with the CCP, stealing Americans data?
This can't possibly be an American company could it?? They'd never ever do anything like this, so it must be those evil communists. Right?
RIGHT?
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did this make you feel better?
No.
Corporate death penalty please. (Score:3)
I think instead of fighting advertisers we should embrace them, copy their ads and post them everywhere. I mean everywhere, even where they have no reason to be. Make it so bad that 'advertiser clicks' is no longer a profitable thing. A soon as a new advertisement appears, post copies everywhere. Every time. Make serving ads completely unprofitable. Copy them into every post, every e-mail, every youtube video. Then do it again until Google cries, and keep going.
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Believe it or not, you're going to get copyright strikes if you post advertising (that isn't yours) to YouTube. They might show it to you 27 times a day, but you're Not Allowed to do your own exhibition.
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Why not just do what Europe did and vote for people who will make this kind of personal data abuse illegal?
Are they selling data or ads? (Score:2)
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If advertisers pay for this access, which they presumably do, then that violates something that the FTC doesn't like. As for me I don't like the entire company.
The only solution is data poisoning. (Score:2)
This is the only way. Any rules we want to put in place, even if we could ram them through, would effectively be unenforceable.
National security risks are not an issue (Score:2)
Neither Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, or any other state or non-state actor has the will or financial/technical resources to just go out and buy this data and use it for any bad purpose. Access to this information will never be used for espionage, blackmail, outing sources, identifying covert agents or facilities, disinformation campaigns, financial fraud, sabotage, social engineering penetration, propaganda, or any hos