Transatlantic Convergence? Recent Cases On Advertising And Privacy From The USA And UK

The US Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) suit against Kochava Inc, a prominent data aggregator and analytics company, faced a recent setback when the Idaho District Court granted Kochava's motion to dismiss the FTC's claim.¹ The FTC alleged that Kochava's sale of geolocation data taken from mobile devices could enable third parties to uncover sensitive, personal information about the mobile device users.

Judgment:

The FTC claim was that Kochava's sale of personal data constitutes an 'unfair' practice — one that risks 'consumer injury'. The Court did not decide this point and found that Kochava's data licensing only satisfies two out of the three legal criteria of 'unfair' practice. The Court accepted that consumers cannot easily prevent Kochava aggregating data collected from their devices and that consumers receive no counteracting benefits as a result of this collection — both of which constitute 'unfair' practice. But crucially, the FTC was unable to