An Idaho federal judge dismissed an FTC lawsuit against location data broker Kochava, saying the agency had not provided adequate evidence to show consumer harm
Natasha Singer / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This dismissal closes the first round of a fight Kochava started: in August 2022 the Idaho broker sued the FTC preemptively, claiming the agency was threatening to sue it for marketing geolocation data that could be used to track abortion clinic visits. Now an Idaho federal judge has sided with the broker, ruling the FTC failed to marshal adequate evidence of consumer harm.
The verdict fits a recurring FTC litigation pattern: the agency's Meta monopoly complaint was also thrown out once on thin evidence before an amended version cleared review, and months later Amazon filed a dismissal motion leaning on the same 'anecdotal evidence' critique. The eventual outcome for Kochava, though, shows dismissal is not the end — the FTC later extracted a settlement banning the company and CDS from selling Americans' location data outright.
First-order effects
- Kochava can continue selling geolocation data commercially while the FTC goes back to court without a proven harm case, vindicating the broker's decision to strike first with its own legal filing.
- The FTC must rebuild its evidence base around actual consumer injury — not just risk scenarios like clinic-tracking — before any refiling of the Kochava case can survive review.
Second-order effects
- Other FTC litigation targets now have a proven dismissal template: Amazon explicitly argued anecdotal evidence and unproven consumer harm in its motion against the agency's antitrust suit, borrowing the exact framing this Idaho judge rewarded.
- Data brokers watching the case learn the defensive playbook — preemption suits and harm-evidence objections — buys time, since the FTC needed three more years to force a ban on Kochava's location-data sales.
Third-order effects
- If contested consumer-harm litigation keeps stalling, the FTC's leverage migrates toward negotiated structural bans — as with the Kochava/CDS settlement — making settlements rather than courtroom wins the agency's main tool against the data-broker economy.
- The episode sharpens the evidentiary standard regulators must meet to justify privacy enforcement, raising the bar for any future attempt to police location-data markets through litigation alone.
The trend: Privacy regulation of the data-broker market is shifting from harm-evidence lawsuits, which courts keep rejecting, toward settlement-forced structural bans on what brokers may sell.