“94B+ geo transactions per month” — that is the figure Kochava promoted for the raw latitude/longitude traffic in its location feed, according to materials cited in the Federal Trade Commission’s case against the company.
The FTC’s proposed order and its immediate legal effect
The Federal Trade Commission has filed a proposed order in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho that would bar Kochava and its subsidiary Collective Data Solutions (CDS) from selling Americans’ precise location data unless they obtain affirmative express consent and the data is used to deliver a service the consumer directly requested. If a District Court judge approves the order, it will carry the force of law.
What the FTC alleged Kochava did
In August 2022 the FTC sued Idaho-based Kochava, alleging the company collected and sold precise geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. The complaint says Kochava’s products let paying clients trace mobile users’ movements to and from locations the Commission described as sensitive: mental health and addiction recovery facilities, reproductive health clinics, places of worship, and shelters for the homeless and domestic violence survivors. The Commission said affected consumers were unaware of and had not consented to the data sharing, leaving them exposed to harms the FTC listed as stalking, discrimination, and physical violence.
Kochava’s sales model and its public data claims
According to the FTC’s filing, Kochava offered clients a user-friendly data feed via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace for a $25,000 subscription fee, marketing what it called “rich geo data spanning billions of devices worldwide.” The company also claimed the feed “delivers raw latitude/longitude data with volumes around 94B+ geo transactions per month, 125 million monthly active users, and 35 million daily active users, on average observing more than 90 daily transactions per device.”
New obligations the companies would face under the order
Beyond the ban on selling, licensing, transferring, or disclosing precise location data without affirmative express consent, the proposed order would require Kochava and CDS to: establish a sensitive location data program; implement a supplier assessment program to verify consumer consent; allow consumers to request disclosures of who received their data and to withdraw consent; submit incident reports to the FTC when third parties misuse location data; and create a data retention and deletion schedule. The FTC’s filing also notes that CDS has since taken over Kochava’s data broker business.
Regulatory context: prior FTC actions and the agency’s stated focus
The Kochava case sits alongside other recent enforcement the FTC has announced. In August 2022 the Commission said it was exploring new rules to crack down on businesses engaged in mass commercial surveillance, and the month before warned it would enforce the law if companies illegally shared or used consumers’ sensitive information. In 2024 the agency banned four data brokers — InMarket Media, Outlogic (formerly X-Mode Social), Gravy Analytics, and Mobilewalla — from harvesting and selling Americans’ location tracking data.
How consumers, data buyers, and suppliers are likely to respond
- Consumers: The proposed order would give individuals the ability to request disclosure of who received their data and to withdraw consent, and would create a reporting regime for misuse — measures the FTC framed as responses to harms such as stalking, discrimination, and physical violence.
- Data buyers (customers who purchased feeds): Organizations that previously accessed Kochava data through a $25,000 subscription on AWS Marketplace will now face limits: they cannot lawfully obtain precise location data from Kochava/CDS without affirmative express consent tied to a consumer-requested service.
- Suppliers and intermediaries: The order would require Kochava/CDS to implement a supplier assessment program to verify consumer consent, increasing documentation and provenance requirements for any third-party data suppliers whose feeds feed into Kochava’s marketplace.
The FTC’s proposed order would mark another step in a series of enforcement actions aimed at location-data brokers. If the District Court judge approves it, Kochava and CDS will face a legal prohibition on commercial distribution of precise location records absent explicit consumer permission and narrow service-based uses — a constraint that will reshape how the company, its customers, and upstream suppliers document consent and handle sensitive-location signals.
