Have you ever worried about your mobile device tracking you? Well, an app analytics company might be making matters much worse. A new federal lawsuit is opening up the question of medical privacy and app location data. Your mobile phone can track everywhere you’ve been, and in some cases know of pregnancy even before the pregnant mother.
When apps can track that sensitive of information, who knows what they would do with it? Today, women’s reproductive health information is more public than ever. No woman would want every company to know they visited an abortion clinic or a pregnancy center. Combine that with the left’s continued targeting of pregnancy centers and things start to look very dicey.
The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit Monday against an app analytics company that sold hundreds of millions of users’ geolocation data that could allegedly reveal user location at abortion clinics, recovery centers, and places of worship.
Kochava Inc, a data broker which hosts one of the largest independent data marketplaces, has been accused by federal authorities of allegedly revealing people’s visits to reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic violence shelters, and addiction recovery facilities. The Commission further accuses the company of enabling others to identify individuals and threaten their safety and credibility.
“Where consumers seek out health care, receive counseling, or celebrate their faith is private information that shouldn’t be sold to the highest bidder,” Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said.
FTC officials allege that the Idaho-based app company has customized data that could track specific mobile device users at night by feeding purchasers a link between someone’s home address and identity.
This company can track their targets from the moment they get up in the morning to the moment they go to sleep at night. If private companies can track that information, you can be sure the government can too. Is this the kind of world we want to live in? Where nothing is private and corporations can know every intimate detail of your life for the right price?
“In just the data Kochava made available in the Kochava Data Sample, it is possible to identify a mobile device that visited a women’s reproductive health clinic and trace that mobile device to a single family residence,” the FTC wrote in its suit. “The data may also be used to identify medical professionals who perform, or assist in the performance, of abortion services.”
Luckily, the lawsuit would require the company to stop disseminating people’s private data, but also delete all of the data they’ve collected. This is, unfortunately, another reminder that this kind of data collection exists and is an ever present threat to American life in the wrong hands.
Democrats often take advantage of technology to viciously pursue the notion that a government should control citizen activities. But the U.S. was founded on the principle that citizens should be controlled by laws, not people.
The 10th Amendment of our Constitution forbids the federal government from powers not specifically delegated to it by the states. These are private matters regardless of what services or products are provided at the stops along the way.
Nevertheless, democrats use information harvested by these activities to leverage voter support, create new forms of taxation and make new laws. Regardless, tracking citizen travel and stops along the way is not the business of government.
This why I only have a landline.