AppLovin Probed by SEC Over Its Data-Collection Practices

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’s shares slid.

The agency has specifically looked into allegations that AppLovin violated platform partners’ 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.

AppLovin declined to comment, saying it generally doesn’t speak on potential regulatory matters. “We regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” the company said by email. “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.” The SEC didn’t comment. “During the shutdown, the SEC’s public affairs office is not able to respond to many inquiries from the press,” the agency said by email.

AppLovin shares fell 14%, the most since April, on Monday. They continued to slide early Tuesday, falling 3% in premarket trading.

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’t 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’t accused AppLovin or its officials of wrongdoing, and it wasn’t clear how advanced the review was.

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.

AppLovin’s 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’s App Store and was barred by Google until a February policy change.

AppLovin Chief Executive Officer Adam Foroughi said that the short reports were “littered with inaccuracies” and denied creating “alternative accurate and persistent identifiers, typically called device fingerprints,” in a blog post in March.

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 “independent review and investigation into recent short report activity.” The company said by email Monday that Spiro was brought in specifically to investigate the provenance of the short reports and why “clearly false reports” were published, adding that “the work continues.”

AppLovin’s platform partners include Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to the company. Apps that use AppLovin’s ad-delivery technology also need to follow the app store rules established by Google and Apple Inc. It’s 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.

AppLovin was one of several companies that declared an interest in buying TikTok’s US operations, before President Donald Trump’s administration announced a plan to hand over control of the social media app’s US operations to a consortium including Oracle Corp.Bloomberg's Nathan Naidu reports.

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