Citing concerns about governmental surveillance of pregnancy, the nonprofit National Partnership for Women & Families is backing proposed privacy settlements that would restrict mobile data brokers' ability to collect or harness location information.
The agreements, unveiled earlier this month, will limit the ability of Mobilewalla to collect location data from real-time bidding auctions, and restrict Gravy Analytics from selling sensitive location data.
The National Partnership for Women & Families praised both settlements in comments to the FTC, writing that data brokers “unrestricted trade” in sensitive location data “presents an increased danger to abortion seekers and providers.”
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“Data brokers’ continued collection and sale of people’s personal information, such as location data showing visits to medical facilities that provide reproductive care, harmfully undermine consumer privacy and reproductive freedom,” the group writes.
“Law enforcement can bypass court approval needed to obtain sensitive data and instead buy it from data brokers, circumventing fundamental Fourth Amendment protections,” the organization writes. “In the context of abortion and pregnancy criminalization, law enforcement access to location data enables investigators and prosecutors to identify and track pregnant people and build cases against them.”
The organization specifically supported provisions in both settlements that prevent Mobilewalla and Gravy from selling or otherwise disclosing sensitive data in products or services.
That “core provision” of the deal will prevent Mobilewallla and Gravy “from selling location data related to visits to reproductive health clinics and mitigate potential exposure to legal action for those seeking abortion care or driving loved ones out of state for such services,” the group wrote.
The restriction on sale also will prevent Mobilewalla and Gravy from “selling sensitive location data to third parties seeking to geofence clinics and target visitors with coercive anti-abortion advertising.”
Mobilewalla and been under scrutiny since at least June 2020, when it published a report analyzing thedemographics of Black Lives Matter protesters in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York. Soon after that report came out, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and other lawmakers questioned the company about its data practices.
The FTC is accepting comments on both proposed settlements through January 6.
More settlements are not what the industry needs, nor what consumers deserve.