FTC Moves to Ban Location Data Sales Raise New Broker Duties

The Federal Trade Commission put data brokers on notice in January with two ground-breaking proposed settlements issued nine days apart that ban companies from selling sensitive geolocation data—making good on years of warnings over the industry’s alleged failures to protect consumers’ information.

“I think what you want to get from these orders is the idea that we take location data as a whole very seriously, and the nature of the sensitive information that it can reveal about people’s lives very seriously,” said Bhavna Changrani, an attorney in the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection who worked on one of ...