InMobi Settles FTC Charges for Tracking Consumer Locations without Permission | Hacker News Reader

InMobi Settles FTC Charges for Tracking Consumer Locations without Permission

ftc.gov

33 pointswalterbell21 comments

So, let's see, a $950k penalty for illegally tracking "hundreds of millions" of consumers' locations works out to ... ($.0095, $.00095)/consumer.

I'll bet InMobi really feels chastised now! Thanks, FTC; you sure showed them!

I guess the question is, how much value did InMobi get per customer from those acts of illegal tracking?

Do you honestly think it was on the order of half a cent per, or close enough that this penalty has teeth?

Several months ago, Verizon was fined $1.3m for their UIDH "super cookies". That worked out to half a minute of their revenue for 2015 — for a program that had been in place since 2012. These penalties are meaningless. They're press release fodder for the company paying them, to be able to say to people, "Gosh, I guess we were naughty. We're really, really sorry. See how contrite we are? You can totally still trust us!"

The lawyer who negotiated that settlement for Vz probably got a bigger bonus than the fine the company paid.

Does it matter? Penalties rarely line up to the profit made from illegal decisions. That's why we see stuff like financial fraud happening constantly. The cost savings/profits are in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, the penalties merely in millions.

Well, some quick back of the napkin math shows that at the upper end (999,999,999 users) the fine equates to roughly a $.95 CPM and at the lower end (100,000,000) it equates to a $9.50 CPM.

So the question is where their margins fall in line with those numbers. I've never negotiated with InMobi so don't have a sense of their rates, but doing more than a $1 CPM seems entirely doable. $9.5 on mobile is a bit tougher, but depending on how they leveraged that data, still possible (particularly if they are brokering that data with any cookie onboarding services in addition to just serving an ad).

My coffee is still kicking in and I'm in a full on food coma, so someone please feel free to chime in and correct my math/logic here if I'm wrong.

What the heck is a "cookie onboarding services" ?

> InMobi was subject to a $4 million civil penalty, which was lowered to $950,000 "based on the company's financial condition," the FTC said in a statement issued Wednesday, without elaborating.

Why should the penalty be reduced based upon InMobi's finances? If the fine bankrupts them, all the better!

Edit: Honestly, I don't know why companies can't be fined based upon a percentage of revenue taken over, say, the past year. A fine of 10% yearly revenue would actually make these bastards sit up and pay attention.

Revenue based fines aren't necessarily always going to be fair because some companies focus on revenue more than others, and it's not fair to penalize them for that.

My guess as to why they lowered the fine is because the FTC doesn't want to appear as though they are deliberately bankrupting companies in efforts to simply make them go away. Things could get way too political at that point, and people could start trying to influence the FTC to bankrupt their competition.

What is the difference between stealing money from one's pocket/locker, and stealing information about someone? In both cases, one is doing it for profit. The only difference is that in the latter, you utilize the information to make money.

The amount of fine appears ridiculous. The FTC might as well could come out and say that there's no violation here as we do not want to appear as being on a witchhunt.

>If the fine bankrupts them, all the better!

What were your thoughts on the RIAA bankrupting people by suing them for $250k/song pirated? All for the better, right?

The difference being that people "pirating" means (typically) that they're downloading for personal use, not for the purpose of generating revenue or profit.

These companies are getting slaps on the wrist for illegal behaviour and can simply consider it a cost of doing business unless the incentives change, eg unless the proceeds of the crime are stripped from them with additional punitive damages.

If a company loses money doing something illegal they should be punished less?

> "based on the company's financial condition,"

Irony is that the company does this in order to "improve it's financial condition".

If it is doing this in the US and got caught what kind of information must they be collecting in other countries where the laws are not so well defined and/or enforced?

We updated the submission link from http://www.infodocket.com/2016/06/22/privacy-ftc-says-mobile..., which just quoted the FTC's press release.

[...] InMobi collected nearby basic service set identification addresses, which act as unique serial numbers for wireless access points. The company [...] then fed each BSSID into a "geocorder" database to infer the phone user's latitude and longitude

The author of this article might need a new technical advisor.

Why exactly? It says that the company was inferring location based on nearby wireless networks. Does your quote not accurately reflect that?

1) geocorder, with a random "r"

2) you don't plug in a BSSID into a geocoder, you would use something like wigle.net to go from BSSID -> lat/long

1) Typos happen

2) That's why geocoder is in quotes. It's a system that performs an operation similar to a geocoder.

What's wrong with it?

Other than "geocoder" being incorrectly written as "geocorder", it's correct. That's how the WiFi trilateration systems in cell phones used for determining location work; it's a simple DB lookup plus a small bit of math.

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