> [App Annie] went to great lengths to assure [Trading Firms] that the financial and app-related data [App Annie] sold was the product of a sophisticated statistical model and that [App Annie] had controls to ensure compliance with the federal securities laws. These representations were materially false and misleading
It's illegal because App Annie was feeding trading firms insider information while swearing it was actually just a really good statistical model. Presumably the actual model wasn't good enough, so they started using unaggregated data to eke out perf.
What they did is not just breach of contract, but insider trading as they fed private information to trading firms.
> the order finds that from late 2014 through mid-2018, App Annie used non-aggregated and non-anonymized data to alter its model-generated estimates to make them more valuable to sell to trading firms.