According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company submitted as an amendment to its plans for an initial public offering, Pandora said that it was not the target of the grand jury probe and that similar subpoenas had been sent to other companies that produce applications for the Apple and Android platforms.
Pandora and other smartphone applications collect data from users, including location, preferences, and backgrounds, to sell products and send targeted advertisements.
Pandora explained in the filing that “privacy groups and government bodies have increasingly scrutinized the ways in which companies link personal identities and data associated with particular users or devices with data collected through the internet, and we expect such scrutiny to continue to increase.”
The company stressed that “restrictions on our ability to collect, access and harness listener data, or to use or disclose listener data or any profiles that we develop using such data, would in turn limit our ability to stream personalized music content to our listeners and offer targeted advertising opportunities to our advertising customers, each of which are critical to the success of our business.”
Details about the federal grand jury probe were not disclosed in the filing. Pandora declined to provide additional details to Bloomberg, which first reported the story.