“The InMarket Apps have been downloaded onto over 30 million unique devices since 2017,” reads the FTC complaint against InMarket Media.
“Respondent also makes the InMarket SDK available to third party app developers, and it has been incorporated into more than 300 such apps which have been downloaded onto over 390 million unique devices since 2017.”
The FTC complaint says InMarket maintains 2,000 categories of distinct “audiences” which tracked people fall into, including “Christian churchgoers,” “wealthy and not healthy,” and “parents of preschoolers.”
Ultimately, the FTC deems InMarket’s five-year data retention policy overly excessive for targeted advertising, significantly elevating the risk of misuse and exposure.
When it comes to location tracking and many other things, data retention and use policies are just a useful distraction from the real problem which is that they’re able to collect the data at all.