In a move that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago, the Federal Trade Commission has barred data broker Kochava and one of its subsidiaries from selling, sharing, or disclosing sensitive location data without a consumer’s explicit, affirmative consent. The company had been trafficking in location data drawn from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, and it is not alone: a parallel action targeted Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel, which handled billions of location points precise enough to trace an individual’s visits to a medical clinic, a place of worship, a domestic-violence shelter, or a military base.
For the first time, the federal government is treating precise location data as inherently sensitive, rather than as just another commodity to be bought and sold with a buried consent checkbox. That is a meaningful shift. States are moving in the same direction, with Virginia and Connecticut both banning the sale of precise geolocation data. If you are new to how this shadow industry operates, our primer on what a data broker actually is walks through how these companies quietly assemble and sell the details of your life.
But enforcement, however welcome, is always a step behind. One broker is penalised while dozens more operate in the gaps, and the raw material they depend on — the location pings and identifiers leaking from your apps and your browser — keeps flowing. A ban on selling data does nothing to stop that data from being generated in the first place. The most reliable protection is still to produce less of it.
That is the quiet advantage of browsing differently. Incognito Browser, the best free privacy browser for Android, is built to minimise the trail you leave behind: it blocks the trackers that harvest your movements across the web and erases your session the instant you close the app, leaving nothing stored on your device for a broker, an advertiser, or anyone else to pick up. Regulators are finally forcing the worst offenders to change. The Incognito Browser Android app lets you stop waiting for them and take that protection into your own hands today — get it free on the Google Play Store.
