FTC lawsuit spotlights a major privacy risk: From call records to sensors, your phone reveals more about you than you think

Where you've been and who you've interacted with are not difficult for governments and corporations to find out. Maskot via Getty Images

The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Kochava Inc. on Aug. 29, 2022, accusing the data broker of selling geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Consumers are often unaware that their location data is being sold and that their past movements can be tracked, according to the commission.

The FTC’s suit specified that Kochava’s data can be used to track consumers to sensitive locations, including “to identify which consumers’ mobile devices visited reproductive health clinics.”