Thread by @WolfieChristl

2 weeks ago the WSJ reported that US government agencies bought access to commercial location data from mobile apps to track immigrants.

Here's another company who claims to gather data from 1 billion devices + promises to assist law enforcement agencies in 'case investigation'.

lotadata.ai, the company who runs citydash.ai, maps the movements of millions based on data from unknown apps.

They sell 'people intelligence' both to businesses and government, for marketing purposes, as well as for 'public safety' and 'law enforcement'.

They claim to have data on people across the planet, including several EU countries:

- Los Angeles 100% coverage
- Madrid 82.3% coverage
- Rome 56,2% coverage

Recently, the FTC caught them misleading the public about their Privacy Shield certification: ftc.gov/enforcement/ca…

There is no evidence LotaData has actually sold data to law enforcement.

Anyway, 2 weeks ago we have learned that DHS, ICE and DEA buy data from the wild west of marketing surveillance. Now another firm openly advertises to sell app data to govt agencies.

https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1225770079595438083

Of course, LotaData is listed as a 'data provider' by the huge consumer data broker LiveRamp (formerly Acxiom), like most shady data companies:
liveramp.com/partners/lotad…

And of course their data is not 'anonymized', but contains common personal identifiers:
lotadata.ai/privacy_policy

"GeoSDK is free to integrate, free to use, and free forever if you are willing to contribute anonymized data from your mobile app"

This is how LotaData explains to mobile app vendors why they should sell their users (personal data):
docs.lotadata.com/geosdk/forever…

LotaData was part of IAB Europe's vendor list. The IAB is the ad industry's business org, their list is used by thousands of publishers to trick users into 'consent'.
vendorlist.consensu.org/vendorlist.json

So millions of EU users did formally agree to LotaData's data processing until Oct 2019.