FTC deleted public evidence of its investigation into phone-tracking data broker after being asked for comment
Federal Trade Commission censored public summary of its contract with tech ethics professor as part of investigation into phone-tracking firm Venntel / Gravy Analytics after it was exposed here.
December 17, 2024: The FTC today emailed a blanket denial of a freedom of information request for documents relating to their contract with Prof. Kirsten Martin, arguing that exposure of the information would compromise the FTC’s law enforcement activities.
December 3, 2024: The FTC yesterday announced a ban on Venntel’s sale of cellphone location-tracking data for several sensitive categories, including surrounding churches, labor unions, and military sites.
October 25, 2024: As forecast in the original article on Thursday, the USASpending contract description originally naming an investigation into Venntel / Gravy Analytics was shortened to remove all reference to the company as of Friday morning.
After refusing to comment on an apparently accidental disclosure of its nascent investigation into the controversial cellphone location-tracking data broker Venntel on Monday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opted to instead silently delete the evidence from public record on Wednesday.
Except, the author caught the erasure during the 24-hour period between the changes appearing in the initial upstream public source, the Federal Procurement Data System (Thursday), and its scheduled arrival in the downstream, user-friendly site USASpending.gov (Friday).
The original contract summary was authored by an FTC employee with email address dgreen1@ftc.gov and first became public on August 5, 2024, reading: “The purpose of this contract is for expert services with Dr. Kirsten E. Martin for Gravy Analytics, Inc. and Venntel, Inc. (Matter No. 2123035).” But an FTC staffer with email address cthompson@ftc.gov modified the summary to simply read “expert services” on Wednesday, according to the record in FPDS. As noted in the author’s report on Monday, Martin is a technology and ethics professor at Notre Dame and the author of the 2022 book “Ethics of Data and Analytics: Concepts and Cases.”
The FTC’s deletion of the public record of its investigation into Venntel and Gravy Analytics, which was said to be assigned Matter No. 2123035, was also too slow to prevent corroboration of the contract summary’s existence on Wednesday by the popular cybersecurity website Krebs on Security. The focus of the article was on a lawsuit filed in New Jersey last week by the Delaware-based Atlas Data Privacy Corp. against the location-tracking data broker Babel Street, whose Locate X product has been reported to make use of data from Venntel.
The FTC declined to comment on its deletion of the information.
"After refusing to comment on an apparently accidental disclosure of its nascent investigation into the controversial cellphone location-tracking data broker Venntel on Monday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opted to instead silently delete the evidence from public record on Wednesday."
Funny how that goes like EPA ended its TRI toxic release inventory when Ground Zero air was declared safe.. lucky we pay for public servants who work so hard to protect us from reality.