Comment by voycey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voycey | Hacker News Reader

As an Location Data Exec I can say that so much of what he 'assumes' here is utter tripe.

There is no need to have the phone in hand with the application open in order to collect location data - we get billions of signals from first party data from background usage on both iOS and Android.

These SDK's require legitimate usage of GPS in order to deliver the functions that we provide - our permission requests are overt and informational - we let users know exactly what data they will be sending and how we use it (one of our products actually rewards users for doing this!).

True, Apple and Android are both cracking down on un-authorised usage and collection of this data, it just means you have to follow some more rules in order to collect this data. Either way it is good for user transparency.

It sounds like (for the most part) he is talking about bid stream data, which everyone in the industry knows is the sewerage of the location data industry. Sure you can get a few valuable insights from it - but should it be classed as location data? No way. Even with significant cleansing it is still mostly garbage. If that is what their entire business model is based upon then no wonder it feels like a ponzi scheme to him.

For the rest of the location world who are using quality data - we see things differently!

Not an exec but work in the geospatial data space. Our company did an analysis of bid-stream data and came to the same conclusion that less than 10% of bid stream data is high quality.

https://blog.safegraph.com/less-than-10-of-bid-stream-locati...

Yep we know your company very well - we came to the same conclusions, even despite the heavy cleansing methods people purport to undertake it is still garbage!

I am curious about this:

> we let users know exactly what data they will be sending and how we use it

Many apps will just say “see privacy policy” or similar when requesting access. See [1] for examples. That is an approach I would consider dishonest as most users will not try to find and read through it. Does your method use a more explicit consent flow? I think that is a big problem in this space, so you could really differentiate yourselves if informing users in a truly explicit manner unlike others.

[1] https://guardianapp.com/ios-app-location-report-sep2018.html

It is a huge problem in this space, we see that. We also believe that transparency and data democratisation is a huge draw for users. I think everyone is aware nowadays that if a product is free, you, are in someway the product.

One of the things we wanted to achieve with our Reward product is that users not only know that we are collecting data but can actively monitor what data we are receiving from their device. Most importantly they can see a independently verifiable 1-1 relationship of rewards for each days worth of data sent.

It isn't much in the grand scheme of things but your data has value, you could argue that this data is payment for such "Free" services such as Facebook and Google - but transparency of this is important.

I really like what Brave and BAT is doing for turning the advertising paradigm around - part of me thinks that it is against human nature and it won't work but we literally have an entire generation of people who do things for "Likes" or "Upvotes" so maybe I am just wrong (I hope I am!)

It's good to hear another perspective...

Just out of technical curiosity, does your dataset contain PII or just UUIDs and location data?

If no PII, how to buyers of the data join it to their own datasets?

The UUID (IDFA / AAID) is 'true north' for us, this allows us to join it to other data-sets, however there are several other methods of attribution we use.

We don't collect any PII data (in fact we actively avoid it!), we don't need to know 'who' a device is, only the location history of that device!

There are companies out there who will attribute a UUID to a physical email / telephone number, I think it is a bit of a grey area and with the current privacy landscape something I think that will soon end.

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