A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’s movements

Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.”

Fast food restaurants and other businesses have been known to buy location data for advertising purposes down to a person’s steps. For example, in 2018, Burger King ran a promotion in which, if a customer’s phone was within 600 feet of a McDonalds, the Burger King app would let the user buy a Whopper for one cent.

Outlogic (formerly known as X-Mode) offers a license for a location dataset titled “Cyber Security Location data” on Datarade for $240,000 per year. The listing says “Outlogic’s accurate and granular location data is collected directly from a mobile device’s GPS.”

Karna
creator
link
fedilink
36
edit-2
1Y

This is how I explained it to one of my friends who is/was definitely a member of “I’ve got nothing to hide” club -

  • Suppose you are in a pay-to-use toilet minding your own Business.
  • That pay-to-use toilet is managed by a public/private entity called ToiletBook.
  • Suddenly you notice a (hidden) camera in the room.
  • When confronted, the owner confirms the only reason they took your picture to suggest you the perfect underwear based on your size. And, there is a legal guarantee that picture/data will never be used for any other purpose and only be processed by machine.
  • Will you still go to such toilet?

BTW, that friend stopped talking to me afterward; not sure why 🤔 (Edit: I should stop giving shitty examples to anyone, as it seems ) 🤐

they left to patent ToiletBook

Karna
creator
link
fedilink
21Y

😂

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.12K Posts
  • 78K Comments
  • Modlog