United States v. InMobi PTE Ltd., No. 16-cv-03474 (N.D. Cal. June 22, 2016)
InMobi SDK, a Singapore-based software developer and mobile advertising company, agreed to pay $950,000 in civil penalties and to implement a comprehensive privacy program to settle FTC charges that its geo-targeting practices violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 and other statutes by collecting consumer (including children's) information without consent. InMobi provides an advertising platform for mobile application developers, which includes access to its software development kit. That software includes geo-targeting products, which allow advertisers to promote products based on users' physical locations. This geo-tracking system requires the app to seek and be granted permission from the mobile user, and allows users to deny access to their locations. However, InMobi's apps were still able to obtain consumers' locations when the mobile device was connected to Wi-Fi networks, by means of analyzing neighboring networks and deducing the users' geographical location from that analysis. Although InMobi's privacy policy stated it did not direct any of its applications toward children under the age of 13, thousands of app developers using InMobi's services alleged that they alerted InMobi that their services were specifically tailored toward children and that InMobi made no attempt to curtail the collection of users' personal information through these applications. View the decision.
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