The AppLovin logo on a smartphone in New York. <\/p>\n
(Bloomberg) — The Securities and Exchange Commission has been probing the data-collection practices of the mobile advertising tech company AppLovin Corp., according to people familiar with the matter. The company\u2019s shares slid.<\/p>\n
The agency has specifically looked into allegations that AppLovin violated platform partners\u2019 service agreements to push more targeted advertising to consumers, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. SEC enforcement officials assigned to cyber and emerging technologies have been handling the matter, the people said. <\/p>\n
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AppLovin declined to comment, saying it generally doesn\u2019t speak on potential regulatory matters. \u201cWe regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,\u201d the company said by email. \u201cMaterial developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.\u201d The SEC didn\u2019t comment. \u201cDuring the shutdown, the SEC\u2019s public affairs office is not able to respond to many inquiries from the press,\u201d the agency said by email.<\/p>\n
AppLovin shares plunged by as much as 19% on the news to $550.15, marking its biggest intraday decline in six months.<\/p>\n
The SEC is responding to a whistleblower complaint filed earlier this year, as well as multiple short-seller reports published in the past several months, the people said. SEC probes don\u2019t always result in enforcement actions by the regulator, but they can lead to fines for companies or corporate officials if the agency determines there were violations. The regulator hasn\u2019t accused AppLovin or its officials of wrongdoing, and it wasn\u2019t clear how advanced the review was.<\/p>\n
AppLovin, which helps mobile app developers find users and sell advertising in their apps, has nearly doubled its market valuation this year to more than $230 billion as of last week, rivaling the market cap of the software giant Salesforce Inc. The company, which has been riding a wave of interest in artificial intelligence tools and ad placement, was added to the S&P 500 Index in September.<\/p>\n
AppLovin\u2019s shares have soared despite a series of short-seller reports this year. Reports from Fuzzy Panda and Muddy Waters accused AppLovin of abusing its position within the mobile advertising ecosystem to harvest proprietary identifiers from other platforms in an unauthorized manner to track users across different websites and apps and retarget them with advertising. This so-called fingerprinting is prohibited by Apple\u2019s App Store and was barred by Google until a February policy change.<\/p>\n
AppLovin Chief Executive Officer Adam Foroughi said that the short reports were \u201clittered with inaccuracies\u201d and denied creating \u201calternative accurate and persistent identifiers, typically called device fingerprints,\u201d in a blog post in March.<\/p>\n
AppLovin also said in late March that it had hired A-list litigator Alex Spiro of law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct an \u201cindependent review and investigation into recent short report activity.\u201d The company said by email Monday that Spiro was brought in specifically to investigate the provenance of the short reports and why \u201cclearly false reports\u201d were published, adding that \u201cthe work continues.\u201d<\/p>\n
AppLovin\u2019s platform partners include Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google, according to the company. Apps that use AppLovin\u2019s ad-delivery technology also need to follow the app store rules established by Google and Apple Inc. It\u2019s unclear which of the partner relationships the SEC is scrutinizing but there is no indication the agency is looking at the conduct of those partners as part of the probe.<\/p>\n
AppLovin was one of several companies that declared an interest in buying TikTok\u2019s US operations, before President Donald Trump\u2019s administration announced a plan to hand over control of the social media app\u2019s US operations to a consortium including Oracle Corp.<\/p>\n
–With assistance from Nicola M White.<\/p>\n
(Adds share move in first and fourth paragraphs)<\/p>\n
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\u00a92025 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The AppLovin logo on a smartphone in New York. (Bloomberg) — The Securities and Exchange Commission has been…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":283166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4192,3638,64,4194,145960,2973,72652,39606,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-283165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-applovin","9":"tag-bloomberg","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-mobile-advertising","12":"tag-platform-partners","13":"tag-sec","14":"tag-securities-and-exchange-commission","15":"tag-targeted-advertising","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115330929715833729","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}