Hackers claim to have compromised Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel which has sold masses of smartphone location data to the U.S. government. The hackers said they have stolen a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on the broader industry, and even location data harvested from smartphones which show peoples’ precise movements, and they are threatening to publish the data publicly.
The news is a crystalizing moment for the location data industry. For years, companies have harvested location information from smartphones, either through ordinary apps or the advertising ecosystem, and then built products based on that data or sold it to others. In many cases, those customers include the U.S. government, with arms of the military, DHS, the IRS, and FBI using it for various purposes. But collecting that data presents an attractive target to hackers.
“A location data broker like Gravy Analytics getting hacked is the nightmare scenario all privacy advocates have feared and warned about. The potential harms for individuals is haunting, and if all the bulk location data of Americans ends up being sold on underground markets, this will create countless deanonymization risks and tracking concerns for high risk individuals and organizations,” Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, and who has followed the location data industry closely, told 404 Media. “This may be the first major breach of a bulk location data provider, but it won't be the last.”