Should location privacy violations trigger automatic independent audits?

Consistency matters. Marriott's order followed breaches affecting more than 344 million customers and imposed 20 years of obligations, while location-data cases can receive a different mix of remedies. A statute could require an initial audit for every violation, then scale the frequency and duration to severity and repeat conduct.

A regulator cannot verify a fix from a press release. The FTC has required companies to obtain independent audits every other year for 20 years in security orders. Location data is sensitive and easy to copy, so an automatic audit after a proven violation gives the public a baseline guarantee that deletion, consent, and retention controls actually work.

Right now the burden of discovering ongoing abuse falls on the public, which is absurd. The FTC had to sue the data broker Kochava in 2022 for allegedly selling location data that tracked people to sensitive places like reproductive health clinics, and cases like that take years while the data keeps flowing. An automatic audit flips the burden to where it belongs: the company that broke the rules pays to prove it stopped. Without that, a violator's promise to behave is worth exactly what its last promise was worth. Independent verification is the difference between a settlement and a press release. If a business cannot survive proving it deleted the data it was told to delete, it should not have been selling people's movements in the first place. FTC

Negotiated settlements have a recidivism problem. Look at the GDPR record: the same giant platforms appear in the enforcement tracker again and again, collecting record fines and then collecting more, because a one-time penalty, however large, is a moment while the business model is forever. An automatic audit tail changes the time horizon. It says the scrutiny does not end when the headlines fade, and every subsequent review is a chance to catch the quiet return to old practices. Companies respond to what is measured repeatedly, not to what is punished once. If twenty years of check-ins sounds long, consider how long the data lives: location histories do not expire, so neither should the verification that they were handled properly. GDPR enforcement tracker

Here is the part nobody prices correctly: audits are cheap and breaches are not. IBM's annual breach report put the average cost of a data breach at $4.45 million in 2023, before counting the regulatory fallout, and location data is among the hardest kinds to contain once it spreads. An automatic audit is a modest, predictable compliance cost next to that kind of exposure. Companies already buy cyber insurance and run penetration tests for the same reason: verification is cheaper than disaster. Making audits automatic after a violation just extends that logic to the aftermath, turning 'trust us, we fixed it' into something a board can actually rely on. The firms that complain loudest about audit costs are usually the ones whose internal controls needed the audit most. IBM

Enforcement always chases the biggest names, which leaves the long tail of apps quietly selling your location. The FTC's Outlogic order made headlines, but thousands of smaller SDKs and data brokers never see a regulator. Automatic audits flip the incentive: instead of betting you are too small to get caught, every company handling location data knows an independent review is coming. The FTC's own orders already impose 20-year audit requirements on caught violators; making the trigger automatic just extends that protection to users who will never be named in a press release. Most people cannot tell which apps sell their movements. An automatic audit can.

Independence on paper does not guarantee useful scrutiny. Companies choose and pay many auditors, and a standard checklist can miss how data really moves. Before making audits automatic, define auditor conflicts, publish meaningful findings, and allow shorter terms for prompt self-reporting. Otherwise we create compliance theater at a cost smaller firms cannot absorb.

Automatic remedies ignore the facts. A one-time vendor configuration error should not trigger the same 20-year burden as deliberate sale of clinic visits. The Outlogic order required deletion, consent, a sensitive-location list, and a privacy program tailored to the conduct. Regulators need room to choose the remedy that closes the actual gap.

There are not enough qualified, genuinely independent auditors to review every company that trips an automatic trigger. Demand would spike, prices would follow, and the cost lands on users through higher prices or on startups through another compliance bill they cannot afford. The biggest firms would simply buy up audit capacity, recreating the cozy auditor-client relationship the proposal claims to fix. Meanwhile the actual harm, data already sold to brokers, cannot be unaudited; you cannot unring that bell, as the deletion and ban remedies in the Outlogic settlement implicitly admitted. Spend the money on banning the sale of precise location data outright. An audit industry is a jobs program, not a privacy fix.