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Locate X Data Tracking Lawsuit | Class Action Privacy Investigation

Written by Joseph Lyon on . Posted in Class Action.

The Data Privacy Lawyers at The Lyon Firm are investigating a person-tracking service called Locate X, which allegedly allows the government and other users to follow a device using its mobile advertising identifier, a unique number assigned to mobile phones. Contact our attorneys to learn more about your privacy rights regarding location data tracking.

What is Locate X?

According to reports from Krebs on Security, an investigation conducted by Atlas Data Privacy Corp uncovered a complex tracking network that can follow the movements of a person’s phone.

The service, called LocateX, is a service provided by Babel Street, a data broker. The service is reportedly capable of showing the whereabouts of certain mobile phones on a map, allowing anyone with access to the service to accurately track someone’s location across state lines. The information can ostensibly then be used to deduce a specific phone owner’s identity.

The LocateX tool works by utilizing the mobile advertising ID (MAID), a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into Google Android and Apple mobile devices. Advertisers build a profile for that specific ID for the purpose of selling targeted ads, which in turn can create a network of locations that data brokers can use. Babel Street uses location data and other identifying information that has been recently collected by websites and sent to advertisers bidding on targeted ads.

Atlas found that for around $10-50,000 per year, data brokers can provide access to tens of billions of data location points covering large swaths of the United States and the rest of the globe. Based on the data sets Atlas gathered, they estimated that they might be able to locate around 80 percent of Android devices, and 25 percent of Apple phones.

Locate X Location Tracking Lawsuit

Access to Locate X is meant to be limited — primarily used in the past by government agencies like the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security — but Atlas discovered that Babel Street may offer the service to almost anyone who claims they have ties to the government.

Atlas hired a private investigator to pose as a customer and contact Babel Street about ways to purchase location data. A Babel Street salesperson reportedly said Locate X is only available to government officials or contractors, but mentioned there were some workarounds.

The private investigator was then apparently offered a free trial of Babel Street, which could determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose families have faced harassment in the past. They also found that Babel Street bundles people-search services with its platform, to make it possible for customers to target a specific device. Some Babel Street features make it possible to determine within a few meters where a target mobile phone, and likely an individual, sleeps at night.

Atlas, which aims to help people remove their personal information from data brokers, has filed a lawsuit against Babel Street for its alleged violation of a New Jersey data privacy law. Data privacy lawyers in other states are investigating other location data tracking claims, and pursuing legal action. Contact our attorneys to learn more about the legal process.

Is Location Data Tracking Legal?

Until recently, the ability to track an individual’s movements was not only unlikely in practice but unthinkable in the realm of personal privacy rights. But Big Tech has unleashed the beast and the entire of personal privacy has almost vanished for anyone who wants to participate in modern life. Now the ability to track a person’s movements can tell you exactly where they live, where they work, shops they frequent and their places of worship.

Class action location tracking lawsuits are challenging the legality of services like Locate X, which are apparently bought and sold to various companies, agencies and individuals. So far in 2024, Atlas Corp. has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class that includes thousands of New Jersey law enforcement officers.

Atlas alleges the data brokers named as defendants have ignored warnings that they are violating a New Jersey statute that allows certain state workers to have their stored location data totally removed from commercial data brokers’ servers.

To be clear, Babel Street is not the only data broker offering location tracking services. There is a surveillance tool called Tangles built by the tech firm PenLink, which is an AI-based service that scrapes information from the internet, as well as the dark web, with a feature called WebLoc that can be used to accurately find mobile phones. The Associated Press reported that law enforcement agencies around the country are using a mobile phone tracking tool called Fog Reveal, at times without warrants.

Can You File a LocateX Class Action Location Tracking Lawsuit?

Contact our data privacy lawyers to learn more about the possibilities of filing legal claims against data brokers who violate your personal privacy rights. The fallout of the LocateX investigation could be significant. It has been mostly a theory for years about the privacy hazards of vast data collection and data brokering location tracking data.

But many consumers did not know the extent of how closely they were being watched. The wide-ranging availability of mobile advertising data has created an open data market in which anyone with the know-how can develop a complex surveillance system capable of tracking the daily movements of millions of people in a mobile network.

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), for example, gives consumers protections over their personal information by limiting the kind of information that data brokers can collect, store and sell. Such enacted regulations explain new privacy rights for California consumers, including:

  • The right to know what personal information a business collects
  • The right to know collected data is used and shared
  • The right to delete personal information that has already been collected
  • The right to opt-out of the sale of personal information
  • The right to non-discrimination for exercising these privacy rights

The Lyon Firm represents plaintiffs in California and all fifty states in a range of data privacy matters. We believe strongly that any company that collects and stores your personal data is legally bound to not only protect it, but to adhere to all state and federal privacy regulations about the sale or dissemination of sensitive information. If any data broker unlawfully collects or sells your data without consent, a class action data privacy lawsuits can be considered.