Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone.
Mobilewalla boasts 40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.
X-Modes website claims its data covers 25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.
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But researchers studying anonymized location datahave shownjust how misleading that claim can be.
(See our methodology here.)
Apps have all kinds of reasons for using your location.
Map apps need to know where you are to get to give you directions to where youre going.
A weather, waves, or wind app checks your location to give you relevant meteorological information.
Companies that trade in this data are reluctant to share which apps they get data from.
The Markup asked spokespeople fromall the companies on our listwhere they get the location data they obtain.
It is all extremely transparent, said Bill Daddi, a spokesperson for Cuebiq.
Theres only so much it’s possible for you to squeeze into the notification message.
You get one line, right?
So you cant say all of that in the notification message, Tsiounis said.
What you have to do is, there has to be a link to the privacy policy.
GasBuddy, Flipp, and Checkout 51 didnt respond to requests for comment.
Foursquares method of obtaining location data through an embedded SDK is a common practice.
We partner with mobile apps providing location services and receive anonymized aggregated data.
Or with a hedge fund that wants insights on how many people are going to a certain store.
There are the data aggregators that collect the data from multiple applications and sell in bulk.
And everybody sells to everybody else.
Both marketplaces feature listings for several of the location data companies that we examined.
Only qualified data providers will have access to the AWS Data Exchange.
Potential data providers are put through a rigorous tool process, Shy said.
Oracle declined to comment.
But Narrative CEO Nick Jordan said the company doesnt even look at the data itself.
Were not buying it, were not selling it.
The most inefficient part of the whole process is actually not delivering the data, Hauer said.
Of the location data firms The Markup examined, the offerings are diverse.
For example, we know that the average income in this neighborhood by census data is $50,000.
Others combine the location data they obtain with other pieces of data gathered from your online activities.
The prices can be steep.
The listing says Outlogics accurate and granular location data is collected directly from a mobile devices GPS.
At the moment, there are few if any rules limiting who can buy your data.
Instead, the law focuses on allowing people to opt out of sharing their location in the first place.
The European Unions General Data Protection Regulation has stricter requirements fornotifying userswhen their data is being processed or transferred.
We know in practice that consumers dont take action, he said.
Its incredibly taxing to opt out of hundreds of data brokers youve never even heard of.
As a result, your company loses money.
Google and Apple both recently banned app developersfrom using location reporting SDKs from several data companies.
Researchers found, however, that the companies SDKs were still making their way into Googles app store.
Apple didnt respond to a request for comment.
The Google Play team is always working to strengthen privacy protections through both product and policy improvements.
This article by Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng wasoriginally published on The Markupand was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
