FTC Relying on 'Factually Inept Scenarios, ' Says Kochava Reply Brief

The FTC raises "a menagerie of overtly politicized but factually inept scenarios” that rely on “bankrupt assumptions,” said app analytics company Kochava Friday in a reply brief Friday (docket 2:22-cv-00377) in U.S. District Court for Idaho in Boise in support of its motion for dismissal of the FTC's Aug. 29 privacy complaint. The agency is seeking a permanent injunction enjoining Kochava from acquiring consumers’ precise geolocation data and selling it in a format that allows entities to track their movements to and from sensitive locations such as medical, reproductive and mental health facilities, temporary shelters or places of worship. The FTC cited Kochava claims that its data feed delivers “raw latitude/longitude data with volumes around 94B+ geo transactions per month, 125 million monthly active users, and 35 million daily active users, on average observing more than 90 daily transactions per device.” The company has sold access to its data feeds on online data marketplaces that are publicly accessible, the FTC said. Though it charges a monthly subscription fee of “thousands of dollars” for access, it has made its Kochava Data Sample publicly available “with only minimal steps and no restrictions on usage,” it said. Identification of sensitive and private characteristics of consumers from the data sold and offered by Kochava “injures or is likely to injure consumers through exposure to stigma, discrimination, physical violence, emotional distress or other harms,” said the FTC. The complaint “fails to state a claim against Kochava because it fails to cite a single law or authority, which proscribes Kochava’s legitimate business practices due to an actual (non-speculative) harm,” the company said.