FTC opened investigation into commercial phone-tracking firm Venntel

The FTC hired Notre Dame technology and ethics professor Kirsten E. Martin as an expert witness for 18 months regarding Venntel and Gravy Analytics.

Prof. Kirsten E. Martin was hired as an expert witness by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for 18 months in early August in relation to an inquiry into the cellphone location-tracking data broker Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics. According to a public contract summary, the investigation is labeled as Matter No. 2123035.

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 24, 2024: Rather than responding to a request for comment on Monday, the FTC chose to instead silently delete the underlying public record on Wednesday. But the author caught the erasure during the 24-hour propagation from arriving in the upstream Federal Procurement Data System on Thursday and landing in the downstream USASpending.gov on Friday. The original contents of the contract summary were also independently corroborated by the popular cybersecurity website Krebs on Security on Wednesday.

According to a public summary of a contract signed in early August, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry into the commercial cellphone location-tracking data broker Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics. The inquiry has been assigned matter number 2123035 and hired Notre Dame technology and ethics professor Kirsten E. Martin as an expert witness for 18 months, already paying out $121,500 of a potential $243,000 ceiling.

The FTC sued a similar commercial cellphone location-tracking data broker in 2022, the Idaho-based company Kochava, and published an amendment as recently as two weeks before hiring Prof. Martin.

Shortly after publication, a public affairs officer for the FTC stated that “We won’t be commenting.”

Venntel rose to prominence in mid-2020 after The Wall Street Journal reported that a congressional committee was investigating the firm’s sale of location data from millions of phones to U.S. government agencies. In November of last year, Venntel and Gravy announced their acquisition by the Norwegian company Unacast, whose CEO Thomas Walle previously sold the music streaming service Tidal to American rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z for $56 million in 2015.

Venntel has also been a data partner of the police surveillance contractor Fog Data Science, whose product has been described as ‘mass surveillance on a budget.’ Venntel was also reported to have been a primary data source of the controversial ‘Locate X’ phone tracking product of the American data fusion company Babel Street.

Martin is simultaneously serving as an expert witness through a similar two-year FTC contract which began in February of last year and has so far paid out $121,500 out of a possible $159,000 ceiling.

Martin also previously led the Notre Dame Tech Ethics Center (ND-TEC), which merged into Notre Dame’s new Institute for Ethics and the Common Good this year, under the leadership of philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan. Martin is also the author of the 2022 book “Ethics of Data and Analytics: Concepts and Cases.”

Prof. Martin and Venntel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. This article will be updated should they respond post-publication.