Placer.ai: Visibility into consumer foot-traffic

placer.ai

24 points·wallflower··9 comments

> Deployed into millions of devices via 500+ mobile apps

A straight up in your face example of why the current wild west approach to privacy is simply not sustainable. A company can embed their tracking along with what ever it is that end users actually wanted to install, no questions asked. Saying this is covered by the ToS is not convincing, this should simply be illegal.

This is absolutely disgusting, developers, please don't install this in your apps, please don't fuel the surveillance economy.

Flagged. There should be no place in our society for privacy vampires like this company.

How do they collect this information?

It seems to be embedded into a mobile app SDK, deployed on 20M+ devices [0].

[0] https://www.placer.ai/resources/our-data/

Deployed how? Why are they hiding main information?

Good question. According to Venture Beat they have their SDK installed in top 100 apps in 2018.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/24/placer-ai-raises-4-millio...

So then through app publishers, either intentionally or through an SDK dependency that they are unaware of. I wonder how app revenue sources is evolving over time. Could it be that "data monetization" is one the rise with the proliferation of startups like this one?

Is this just an ad? Or a warning?

Yes.

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