Pinsight is a big one.

But there are too many to name. In 2018, you should assume that any free service (Unroll.me), web/mobile SDK (Slice), email client (Airmail), personal finance tracker (Mint), integration API (Plaid), geolocator (Foursquare), etc is monetized by selling your data en masse for market research.

It's not just location data. Dig into the TOS of free services you use. It's your receipts, your transactions, your subscriptions...all are "anonymized" to varying degrees of success. Even Meraki, the network router/switch company, sells location data.[1]

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1. https://meraki.cisco.com/technologies/location-analytics

Link to pinsight: https://pinsightmedia.com

> Ever wonder what your consumer thinks minute-by-minute? Pinsight’s ID Suite gets behind the lock screen to understand the mindset of your best customer. Leveraging 24/7 insights from the mobile device, we uncover new audiences and discover new market opportunities so you can engage with consumers in ways that matter.

“Gets behind the lock screen”

Jeez that is some brazen marketing.

I hear "groping inside the knickers".

It's blatant and normalized.

Assuming you’re talking about Airmail, the iOS and Mac mail client[1] (which is not a free app), do you have any reference to back up this claim? Their privacy statement states:

> Airmail does not share your information with any third parties. We are not in the business of selling your data. However, we may disclose information if we determine that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to comply with the law.

They also state that they do not send information to their servers unless you enable push notifications, store data only for this purpose, and delete the data when you disable this setting.

[1] http://airmailapp.com

Yes I think you're right, sorry. I'm thinking more of the email clients like Edison [1] and Astro[2]. It gets hard to keep all of these apps straight :)

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1. https://trends.edison.tech and https://mail.edison.tech

2. https://www.helloastro.com/privacy/

Hasn't Foursquare been doing this and nothing but this for ten years now?

Foursquare is selling business services based on the data they collect, not the data itself (as far as I know).

They sell direct location analytics: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290543

This is mostly a distinction without a difference, because for firms that do this, one of those "business services" is providing a thin layer of analysis over the underlying data.

What I'm saying is they don't sell the raw location data they've collected. There is a huge difference between derived analytics and the raw point-by-point device-linked location data. It's a reduction of multiple terabytes of data down to a few kilobytes of identity-obfuscating information. I am not affiliated with Foursquare but I appreciate the direction of their pivot.

Honestly, since my line of work is similar (tangential) to what they do, my opinions are probably quite different from the moral majority who might read about this kind of issue without understanding the range of applications. I'm not sure what the solution is but I think there is a regulatory solution that preserves both consumer privacy and the extraction of economy-benefiting value. And I do think something needs to be done to protect privacy, even if it means negative impacts to the commercial space I am in.

Any company that sells you access to ad real-time bidding. You connect to a event fire-hose that gives you a nice standardized json for each ad target, with plenty of data about the user (including geolocation), and you choose whether to bid or not on each ad, in realtime.

It is an open standard:

https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb-project...

Do you get that data before you place the bid? Can you can just bid the minimum amount so you never actually buy an ad, but get the tracking data anyway?

You get all the data (geo, user's year-of-birth, user interests, device type, etc) before you place the bid. All the json data fields are defined in the standard. I can see iOS and Windows-phone in the feed, it's not limited to Android phones.

https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/OpenRTB_API_S...

You don't actually have to bid.

(HN is rate-limiting me) edit: Data is pushed to you as fast as you can process it. It's a firehose.

To get a seat on the exchange, you need to bid, and exchanges also don't allow you to store data of bid requests that you don't win for purposes other than bid algorithm optimization in their terms and conditions, since that's stealing data. If they find out you're freeloading, they'll cut you out.

Also, most of the data on it is pretty shitty with lots of fraud since the publishers want to get more money. The geo data is often fraudulent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_center_of_the_conti...), and that's why companies that bid hire data scientists to sift through the fraud.

There's also rarely, in my experience, year-of-birth or any personally identifiable data.

In a typical bid entry there are between 500 and 5000 bits of information relating to an individual, per the definition of GDPR. And that's not including the dreaded "IFA", which uniquely identifies the individual.

I don't agree with your claim that "the geodata is often fraudulent".

Anyone can read the linked pdf specification (above), download sample data from the exchanges, and judge for themselves.

Is it pushed to you or do you pull it? Is there no rate limiting?

That’s really creative honestly.

Advan, Reveal Mobile, QuestMobile, Pinsight, Streetlight Data, RootMetrics, OpenSignal, SafeGraph are a few of the companies selling various forms of mobile user location data.

Most funds actively try to stay out of the media. For some it's a core strategy.

( "Out of sight, out of mind" )

Crawling under the rock safe from the light of day.

On some level I don't blame them as our national media discourse is at a 5th grade level.

>> Hedge funds or services who analyze it for hedge funds is the big one. It's normal to track hundreds of millions of people a day and trade stocks based on where they go.

> Any articles/webpages about this one? Or a company name who is doing it?

Foursquare does it, there were some articles last year about how they pivoted to providing that data. They were able to accurately predict Chipotle customer declines after their food contamination scandals.

I'm not sure if they use this carrier location data, or just the data from the people who are still using their app.

Edit: here's one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/04/2...