Yesterday the New York Times had a very interesting feature on how marketing companies use very precise location data from smartphone apps to identify and target people.
The Times talked with various location data companies. Once people had given the app permission to use their location (for weather information, tracking running, etc.) they would find out where that person was within a few yards many times a day. The fact that, for many of the apps, the person’s location data would also be used for marketing purposes was buried in the app’s terms.
The anonymous data can be useful for understanding customer behavior when aggregated. Where do that business’s customers live? Where else do they shop?
But – when combined with publicly available data — just by looking at where the person spends several hours every night it’s easy in most cases to identify who they are. (One of the article’s authors, Natasha Singer, wrote four years ago that data scientists, using just four pieces of non-location data, in 90% of cases can figure out who a person is.)
The OMG moment in the article for me was when one marketing company said that they targeted anonymous people in emergency rooms with ads for personal injury lawyers.
Of course, if you use a smartphone GPS service, like Google Maps or Waze (which is also owned by Google), you know that you’re giving up this data. And of course Google uses that for targeting ads. Facebook uses its app data for the same purpose. This is the Grand Bargain that we’re making with technology: give us lots of useful free stuff in exchange for some/much of our personal information.
