FTC Settles Unprecedented Case Against Data Broker

The FTC announced today its first ever settlement with a data broker for selling location data.

The FTC alleged that the data broker, Outlogic, formerly known as X-Mode Social, sold precise consumer location data and allowed third parties to track visits to health care providers, houses of worship and other sensitive destinations.

The FTC claims that Outlogic had no controls in place to stop third parties from using the data.

Finally, a few months ago, they started to strip sensitive locations from the data they sold.

The also did not honor do not track requests from Android users.

The data that they sold was in raw form (not anonymized) and was tied to people’s unique phone identifiers.

A spokesperson for X-Mode/Outlogic said company officials “disagree with the implications of the FTC press release,” and noted that “the FTC found no instance of misuse of any data and made no such allegation.”

It appears that Outlogic buys a lot of its data from third parties and assumes that the third party app developers have obtained consumer consent.

X-Mode/Outlogic will not only be prohibited from sharing sensitive location data under the proposed order, but also will be forced to build a program that allows it to develop a list of sensitive locations; destroy location data it has already gathered; and formally track whether its suppliers are allowing consumers to give informed consent for collection of their data, among other provisions.

While this is a start, there are, at least, hundreds of these large data brokers and the FTC cannot go after each of them. This is only a start.

Credit: The Record

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