US Federal Trade Commission (Federal Trade Commission, FTC) announced the settlement of the proceedings with a broker of location data. The FTC solution is a signal that the agency enhances control over the sector, which often sells the sensitive data of people without their knowledge and consent.
What is the reason for the proceedings?
Inmarket Media, based in Texas, is accused of inaccessible border, use and storage of data on the location zhenya users who were then offered to advertisers in the form of specialized audience segments and were stored for 5 years.
FTC claims that Inmarket did not provide consumers with complete information and did not receive their consent before collecting and selling data on the location of advertisers. The company’s actions violate the section 5 of the FTC (FTC ACT) Law, which prohibits the unscrupulous and misleading practice.
FTC indicates that Inmarket has created a package of development tools in Inmarketsdk (Software Development Kit, SDK), which is built into mobile applications. The technology made it possible to track the exact movements of users, placed in applications requesting access to the location in the operating system of a mobile device.
Since 2016, about 100 million unique devices annually transferred data on the location in Inmarket, and since 2017, the technology has been loaded by more than 390 million unique devices. A huge amount of downloads was caused by the promise of Inmarket to provide part of the income of more than 300 applicants for applications who have introduced Inmarket technology into their products.
FTC said that Inmarket location data are transmitted to a larger targeted advertising system that compares the history of locations with specific places to determine whether the user visited the advertised places. According to the FTC complaint, the company then sorted consumers for almost 2,000 segments of targeted advertising, for example, “parishioners of the Christian Church”, “healthy and rich” or “not healthy and rich”.
The complaint also states that Inmarket sold advertisers the opportunity to send consumers to the Push notifications depending on their location. For example, a consumer located within 200 meters from the pharmacy could