Feature · checked 29 September 2026
The party-safety app that grew into a location-data broker.
A 2016 listing for a college drinking-safety app whose company became X-Mode, the data broker the FTC barred from selling sensitive location data in 2024.
When the Wayback Machine saved Drunk Mode's Stompstart page in March 2016, the pitch read "Get Crazy, Stay Safe." The app was written for college students, their parents and their universities, and its feature list read like a plan for a long night out. Find My Drunk used GPS to track friends who had wandered off. Stop Drunk Dialing hid chosen contacts. Breadcrumbs recorded where you had been so you could retrace your steps the next day, and a newer button found an Uber or Lyft home.
The listing's biggest idea was still on the way. With a Colorado startup called Fabriq, the makers planned an alert for missing students: if someone disappeared in a college town, their last 24 hours of location history and their profile would be pushed to every Drunk Mode user within three to five miles. The page claimed 100 to 200 users in every college town where the app had landed.
Most features on that list ran on location data. Within about a year, so did the company's business.
By May 2017, the trade publication Street Fight was describing X-Mode as Drunk Mode's parent company. Founder Josh Anton had built a location SDK, a bundle of code that other developers add to their own apps, and X-Mode sold anonymized location insights to advertisers. Drunk Mode itself had 1.3 million downloads, Street Fight reported. That September, Anton told the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce how the change happened: "In the process of creating a 'legit' company, Drunk Mode became X-Mode." By then, he said, the SDK was in more than 100 apps.
In November 2020, Vice's Motherboard reported that location data gathered through X-Mode's SDK was reaching US military contractors. The most popular app it connected to the trade was Muslim Pro, a prayer app with more than 98 million downloads, and it reported that archived versions of X-Mode's website listed Sierra Nevada Corporation and Systems & Technology Research as customers. X-Mode told Motherboard it did not work with either.
Digital Envoy announced on 4 August 2021 that it had acquired X-Mode Social and renamed it Outlogic, with Anton joining Digital Envoy as chief strategy officer. It did not disclose terms.
On 9 January 2024, the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed order barring X-Mode Social and Outlogic from sharing or selling sensitive location data: data the agency said could track visits to medical and reproductive health clinics, places of worship and domestic abuse shelters. The FTC called it its first settlement with a data broker over the collection and sale of sensitive location information, and said the order would require the company to delete location data it had collected unless it obtained consent or made the data non-sensitive. The release lists Drunk Mode among the company's apps.
The old listing placed Drunk Mode in San Francisco; the FTC describes the company as Virginia-based. The drunkmode.org site no longer loads.