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Advertiser That Tracked Around 100M Phone Users Without Consent Pays $950,000 (arstechnica.com)
Mobile advertising firm InMobi will be paying a fine of $950,000 and revamp its services to resolve federal regulators' claims that it deceptively tracked locations of hundreds of millions of people, including children. Ars Technica reports:The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users' ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn't given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users. Specifically, the FTC alleged, InMobi collected nearby basic service set identification addresses, which act as unique serial numbers for wireless access points. The company, which thousands of Android and iOS app makers use to deliver ads to end users, then fed each BSSID into a "geocorder" database to infer the phone user's latitude and longitude, even when an end user hadn't provided permission for location to be tracked through the phone's dedicated location feature.
Nice to know the courts value our privacy so dearly!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
$960k is peanuts for them.This worked out great. Enough to do it again once the dust settles.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
, you don't get to see/feel what happens when you drop the soap. It's about time these criminals did time.
The corporation didn't make the decision to illegally perform these actions, people did. Furthermore, they were very likely to be senior fuckwits. Enough is enough. Send them to jail as if they social engineered your personal details. Multiply that jail time by the number of people they affected. The board, the primary shareholders, and the management that enforced this need to be hauled in front of judges - now!
The phone OS is delivered by a huge ad company, it has GPS, a microphone, Wifi, a compass and Bluetooth.
What is surprising, exactly?
Anyone using Android and expecting to not be tracked by advertisers is a dumbass.
:D
Sorry - Im trying to apply the music-cartel logic.
Requiem for the American Dream
Okay, nice story and all, but can we go back to talking about Apple's headphones? Clearly that's a rumor everybody wants to babble about.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Is the implication I'm meant to take from this statement that it's okay if they deceptively track the location of hundreds of millions of people as long as it excludes children?
It's "geocoder" not "geocorder."
The ineptitude of the new editors is at an all time high... Whipslash, what gives? Thought you all were great until these just terrible posts lately with large errors. Shouldn't you hire some actual nerds? As this is... news for nerds.
If you can't program, or do advanced maths, you probably shouldn't be an editor for Slashdot.
100M users tracked? $950k is insultingly low.
TO cut down on advertising I changed my default Android browser from Chrome to Opera Mini. Now, I see that move paid off in ways that one would not expect. InMobi should be prosecuted, not just fined. Such a pussy move by the regulators.
I know it is unwelcome but I could see writing a very similar application. The API request for GPS location failed, fine give me the general location information the OS cobbles together. The general location API fails fine, tell me what network he was on and I will try and figure out if I have anyone else on that network so I can tell about where they are.
How is this really different than running geo-location on an IP to see where a visitor to your website is coming from? I find these types of regulations are too close to thought police for my comfort.
As a side note, reading the actual complaint it looks like most of it is closer to 'False Advertising'. Count (I) and (II) look to just say that since you said in API/Advertising that they had to turn on these permissions it implies that if they don't you can't do your geo-adds thing. That you can do some crippled version of this using WIFI signals shows that you lied. This part at least I can understand although it sounds like the FTC being a bit touchy. The last count (III) is just scary as hell as it implies that having the IP address of someone connecting to a child oriented website is virtually illegal unless they have parent consent. How do you get consent before someone connects to you I don't know.
license agreement to track my every move across the globe!
So I guess Google is on the safe side with my consent.
Criminal prosecution of corporate crime won't happen anymore, so it is time to start keeping tally of who this fuckwits are and what crimes they signed off on, and when the threshold is met, make a spectacle of a few to remind them that the people can accede power, but they can also take away life when angered. The wealthy seem to have forgotten this.