Gravy Analytics has been sued yet again for allegedly failing to safeguard its vast stores of personal data, which are now feared stolen. And by personal data we mean information including the locations of tens of millions of smartphones, coordinates of which were ultimately harvested from installed apps.
A complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in northern California yesterday, is at least the fourth such lawsuit against Gravy since January, when an unidentified criminal posted screenshots to XSS, a Russian cybercrime forum, to support claims that 17 TB of records had been pilfered from the American analytics outfit’s AWS S3 storage buckets.
The suit this week alleges that massive archive contains the geo-locations of people’s phones.
Gravy Analytics subsequently confirmed it suffered some kind of data security breach, which was discovered on January 4, 2025, in a non-compliance report [PDF] filed with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority and obtained by Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
Three earlier lawsuits – filed in New Jersey on January 14 and 30, and in Virginia on January 31 in the US – make similar allegations.
Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel were banned from selling sensitive location data by the FTC in December 2024, under a proposed order [PDF] to resolve the agency’s complaint against the companies that was finalized on January 15, 2025.
The FTC complaint alleged the firms “used geofencing, which creates a virtual geographical boundary, to identify and sell lists of consumers who attended certain events related to medical conditions and places of worship and sold additional lists that associate individual consumers to other sensitive characteristics.”
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Source: Gravy Analytics soaks up another sueball over data breach • The Register
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