Location-Aware AI Caught Up in Post-Roe Data Privacy Issues
Regulators in Washington are considering outlawing the sale of certain types of location data, such as that linking individuals to visits to health clinics. Location AI is in a privacy war zone.
John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Busines
Good AI is being infused with location data to add value to the travel and logistics industries especially, and bad AI is being used by data brokers to specifically target what they see as an opportunity.
For example, the movements of women suspected of having or planning to terminate a pregnancy, in the wake of the overturn of Roe vs. Wade by the US Supreme Court, and subsequent state laws making it a crime.
This bad AI has attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which recently brought suit against an Idaho company it accused of selling location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones that could be used to track people visiting abortion clinics and other healthcare locations.
The FTC filed the suit in federal court in Idaho, saying that Kochava, Inc. was unfairly selling sensitive data in violation of federal law. “The FTC is taking Kochava to court to protect people’s privacy and halt the sale of their sensitive geolocation information,” stated Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in an account from NBCNews.
Kochava’s CEO Charles Manning issued an immediate response, denying that the company sold sensitive location data around women’s visits to health clinics. He stated on reading the FTC lawsuit, “You’ll see it is entirely based on hypothetical scenarios, there are no references to any actual instance where Kochava sold data to reveal visits to sensitive locations.
Kochava offers what it calls a “Marketing Operation System” that integrates multiple channels for advertisers and publishers into one system. To avoid sensitive location data from being available in the data marketplace, he suggested the FTC “provide specific locations to data providers to actively block. They have yet to do that.”
Brian Cox, general manager of the company’s online data marketplace known as the Kochava Collective, said the company sources its data from companies that say they have the consent of consumers. “Kochava sources 100 percent of the geo data in our data marketplace from third party data brokers, all of whom represent that the data comes from consenting consumers,” he stated in the NBC News account.
The FTC stated that people are often unaware that their location data is purchased and shared by Kochava, and that they have no control over its sale or use.
Transportation and Logistics Sectors See Role for Location-Aware AI
AI is being applied in the location data industry to analyze location data to help create more accurate maps. Increased competition in the mobility auto transportation and logistics sectors “has spurred even further demand for advanced AI solutions, particularly location-aware AI,” stated Giovanni Lanfranchi, CTO and SVP Development, HERE Technologies, of Burlington, Mass., in a 2021 account in GeoSpatial World. HERE is owned by a consortium of German auto companies and the American semiconductor company Intel.
“This means AI that is able to understand the properties of location information and allows developers to leverage these insights into their applications and products,” stated Lanfranchi, author of the article. The AI helps with pattern recognition and location signatures, a key component needed to generate high-definition maps and realistic simulators. “These intelligent visualizations are making next-generation mobility possible,” Lanfranchi stated.
In Washington, regulators are trying to figure out what rules need to be applied and what implications location-aware AI has for privacy. The location data industry is in the crosshairs of Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a risky position to be in. Placer.ai, a location data company serving retail and other industries, stated in a letter to Sen. Warren that in response to her request, they had reviewed all Planned Parenthood locations on its platform that were ever accessed by paying or free customers, according to a recent account in Vice.
Placer.ai stated that between 2020 and 2022, data on 17 Planned Parenthood locations was accessed. Some of those instances would have included journalists, but not all. The company has since removed the ability to search for Planned Parenthood-related data on its website. In a June blog post, the company stated it was “disabling user access to data'' about sensitive locations, including “reproductive health providers.”
Sen. Warren said it was a good start, “But with Roe v. Wade dead and states across the country seeking to criminalize essential health care, we can’t rely on the goodwill of Big Tech to protect Americans’ data and safety. That’s why I’m calling on the United States Congress to pass my Health and Location Data Protection Act to ban brokers from selling location and health data and establish serious privacy protections for consumers.”
Law Enforcement Can Subscribe to Access Location Data on Millions
Smartphone users need not only be concerned with what the NSA, CIA and FBI might be doing with location data, they also need to be concerned about what local law enforcement may be doing with it.
Fog Data Science is a company providing law enforcement with easy access to the precise and continuous geolocation of hundreds of millions of Americans, collected through smartphone apps and aggregated by data brokers, according to a recent account on the site of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco.
For a subscription fee, law enforcement agencies can gain access to a massive, searchable database of where people are located, according to the account. Sometimes the agency gets a search warrant, sometimes not. “This is mass surveillance, often with no judicial oversight,” stated Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst with the EFF, author of the article. He added, “Police use of Fog is a major blow to civil liberties in the United States.”
Fog responded that the company’s product incorporates data willingly provided by consumers, such as when they “consent” when downloading an app. “But no reasonable person expects this will result in the app tracking all their movements, the app developer selling this sensitive information to a data broker, and police ultimately buying it,” Guariglia states.
Fog also responded that its product does not contain personally identifying information, such as names and phone numbers. However, researchers have found that four spatio-temporal points were enough to identify 95 percent of the 1.5 million people whose movements were tracked in a 15-month set of phone mobility data, the author stated.
“Claims that location data has supposedly been ‘anonymized’ are highly dubious,” he stated.
It is difficult to determine whether Fog has access to your data, and not easy to do anything about it if they do. “The biggest thing we can all do is put pressure on Congress and the states to protect our privacy,” Guariglia stated. “It’s up to lawmakers to act fast to slip the switch and for big government entities from buying geolocation data sold on the open market.”
Read the source articles and information from NBCNews, GeoSpatial World, Vice and from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
(Write to the editor here.)