PANOPTICON therecord ftc location brokers
page 1 / 3
The Record — FTC targets companies that collected and sold sensitive location data
retrieved 2026-07-11
archived for offline mesh reading
------------------------------------------------------------
-
-
-
-
-
Leadership
-
Cybercrime
-
Nation-state
-
Influence Operations
-
Technology
-
Cyber Daily®
-
Click Here Podcast
Subscribe to The Record
✉️ Free Newsletter
FTC targets companies that collected and sold sensitive location data
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a crackdown on major players in the location data industry on Tuesday, including one company selling surveillance products to an array of law enforcement agencies that use it to track individuals' precise locations, capturing visits to sensitive destinations.
That company, Gravy Analytics, and its subsidiary Venntel, extract location data from apps on smartphones or harvest it from advertising markets. The data is then peddled to law enforcement and other government agencies.
Gravy and Venntel are barred from selling, sharing or using sensitive location data moving forward, according to the FTC’s proposed order, which makes an exception only for “limited circumstances” tied to national security and law enforcement needs.
Separately, the FTC said another company, Mobilewalla, allegedly sold data pinpointing consumers traveling to sensitive locations. It is barred from selling such data — including where consumers’ homes are located — as part of a settlement alleging that it made such transactions without “taking reasonable steps to verify consumers’ consent,” the FTC said.
The FTC defines sensitive locations as including medical facilities, such as those relating to substance abuse, reproductive care and psychiatry; religious organizations; correctional facilities; labor union offices; homeless shelters; groups providing services based on race and ethnicity; and military sites.
Data powering the surveillance state
Venntel’s data is reportedly used by the powerful and controversial surveillance company Babel Street to power its product Locate X, which sells data locations so precise that it makes it possible for anyone to track individuals' visits to highly sensitive locations such as abortion clinics.
Gravy Analytics and Venntel say they gather more than 17 billion signals from about a billion smartphones every day, in part by obtaining the information from other data suppliers, the FTC said.
The location data the companies sell is not anonymized and can easily be used to identify individuals, according to the FTC’s complaint.
Under the FTC order, the companies will be required to erase or de-identify historic sensitive location data going back three years.
The agency’s action against Gravy and Venntel is especially striking because of how its effects will cascade down to law enforcement, which has admitted to using sensitive location data that it would only have been able to obtain with a warrant prior to the development of the robust data broker marketplace.
The complaint’s description of the exception under which the companies can continue to sell or license sensitive location data appears to significantly curtail law enforcement’s access to it by outlining that it can only be sold for “national security purposes” or to a federal law enforcement agency responding to an “imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm to a person.”
Venntel’s data, either on its own or through how it powers Babel Street, is widely used by law enforcement.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have each contracted with Babel Street to collect location data which has been weaponized against migrants, advocates say.
In July 2022 the ACLU released records showing that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used Venntel and Babel Street data to buy access to cell phone locations.
The documents the ACLU received from DHS showed that for one three-day period in 2018, the agency obtained about 113,654 location points from the data brokers. That data came from a small area in the southwest and did not capture the total volume of location data available to DHS nationwide, the ACLU said at the time.
In 2022, the FBI signed a contract worth as much as $27 million with Babel Street in exchange for 5,000 licenses to use its software.
Venntel and its parent company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Alleged unfair practices
The FTC says Gravy and Venntel violated the FTC Act by “unfairly selling sensitive consumer location data, and by collecting and using consumers’ location data without obtaining “verifiable user consent for commercial and government uses.”
Gravy Analytics did not stop using consumers’ location data even after it discovered that they did not give informed consent for the collection, the FTC said.
It also sold what the FTC called “sensitive characteristics,” including health or medical decisions, political activities and religious viewpoints, which it inferred from its vast trove of consumer location data.