> 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.
It's blatant and normalized.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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