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@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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 ) 🤐

  • doctortofu@reddthat.com
    0·
    11 months ago

    And that’s why location is always off on all my devices, and gets turned on only when I want to search for something nearby or use navigation. Then it goes back off until the next time I need it.