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Advertiser That Tracked Around 100M Phone Users Without Consent Pays $950,000 (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the tracking-all-the-time dept.

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.

5 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Less than $0.01 per victim by mrchaotica · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nice to know the courts value our privacy so dearly!

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    1. Re:Less than $0.01 per victim by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But if they somehow obtained, say, an MP3 track... THEN we can talk about damages.

      Because obviously some random auto-tune recording carries far more judicial weight than your piddly personal information.

  2. Good ROI by mfh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    $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.
  3. If you have money and break the law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    , 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!

  4. $950k is insultingly low. by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    100M users tracked? $950k is insultingly low.