The lawyers point to a series of claims made by data collectors in recent years, including Kochava, an analytics advertising platform that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued last year for tracking the mobile devices of millions of people in and around reproductive health clinics, domestic violence shelters. , and places of worship. The company’s data collection exposed, the FTC said, an unwitting population to “threats of stigma, stalking, discrimination, job loss, and even physical violence.” In a legal complaint, the agency cited Kochava’s capabilities that allowed it to track the location of approximately 125 million devices per month.

The letter also references databases run by British multinational RELX and Canadian conglomerate Thomson Reuters, which, according to Sarah Lamdan, a CUNY law professor and author of Data cartels: the companies that control and monopolize our informationcontain records on approximately two-thirds of the American population, tracing their movements and mapping their social and family relationships.

In 2020 alone, data brokers lost some $29 million trying to undermine legislative efforts to rein in their industry, according to lobbying disclosures uncovered by The Markup.

While many large data collectors acknowledge that they fall under the FCRA’s jurisdiction, others have escaped regulatory scrutiny by relying on what Chopra’s petitioning attorneys say is flawed legal analysis. Other companies divide their products and the monitoring data they collect to exempt from compliance what the credit reporting industry calls “header information,” traditionally consisting of people’s names, their dates of birth and social security numbers, in addition to their telephone and residential history. This, even when this data comes from sources clearly subject to the law.

“Data brokers bundle the same personal data about us into different products to sell, then claim that certain products are beyond the scope of key legal protections,” says Laura Rivera, an attorney at Just Futures Law. “It is dishonest, exploitative and results in real harm to consumers of all backgrounds, but particularly to low-income communities of color, including immigrants.”

“By advocating for data broker coverage, we are simply asking the CFPB to restore the scope of the law as Congress originally intended,” adds Chi Chi Wu, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, who identified a series of binding courts. decisions over the years that have watered down the FCRA.