Foursquare To Start Selling Your Data | Hacker News Reader

Foursquare To Start Selling Your Data

hasoffers.com

28 pointskellyhclay14 comments

Title seems to be misleading. The article body states that they are offering ad targeting using checkin information. Such an arrangement does not involve the sale of the checkin information, not even access to it.

Foursquare is pitching that checkin data will be available as targeting markers to advertisers. If advertisers pay for this, they are paying for checkin information.

Not necessarily.

Take the "soccer moms" example. Foursquare can say "we have X soccer moms checking in." A third party says "Here's an ad we'd like you to serve to soccer moms." Foursquare does it and returns usage data -- how many soccer moms clicked, etc.

Not saying that's how they'd do it, just saying that it's possible, feasible, even easy to provide ad retargeting without any data visibility at all. It's a little early to cry foul, imo.

Once Facebook acquired Gowalla and Glancee, the writing was always on the wall for Foursquare. They need revenue as their business model is still shaky at best and seeing Facebook cannibalize this opportunity must have been a deciding factor. The irony is that they should probably should have sold to Facebook (who reportedly offered them $120M). Facebook would probably have done a better job monetizing check-ins with their current advertising clients than Foursquare will ever be able to. Too little too late IMHO.

As for the user, if people don't realize by now that they are the product, by receiving a service for free, then they probably deserve to be taken advantage of.

There's no such thing as a free lunch if you check-in ;-)

I am totally fine with this; one of the things (I) assumed 4sq would do with all the checkin data.

It is strange this article makes it seem like some dirty little secret that companies like 4sq need to make money.

Either the product costs money, or you are the product.

The current TOS clearly states that they do not sell user data. Until that TOS is changed they have no right to sell their user data to advertisers. Once it does change, which I'm sure will be soon, the question will be whether or not they have the right to sell user data that was collected before the TOS was changed.

they will probably do something sneaky like change the TOS, and tell users by email "We changed the TOS, and all data before it was changed can now be sold unless you click on this link, press Disapprove, and confirm via email and text that you disapproved"

It's not some dirty secret companies make money off of ads (that's why we're in business.) It's a dirty secret to make money off of ads using customer data and not tell your customers about it.

Ad targeting != Selling personal data. This is a misleading, linkbait title.

They're selling your personal check-in data to retargeters, which is fine if the TOS specifically stated that they're doing this, but it doesn't.

> They're selling your personal check-in data to retargeters

There's no evidence that that's happening.

According to Foursquare's pitch deck, that's exactly what they plan to do.

Cite it, then. I went through the slide deck. It talks about aggregating and selling "retargeting personas" based on check-in markers (e.g. "checked in once at a resort in the last year"), but nothing about selling your personal check-in data.

I think you're reading what you want into this.

Would an accurate analogy be an old fashioned magazine article, where as far as I know the advertiser does not get a copy of the entire subscription list personal details, but they do get proof that each subscriber got one copy of their ad?

Maybe the old fashioned yellow pages paper phone book is an even better example. All I know for certain is everyone in zip code abcde just got a copy of the ad. That doesn't mean they have a list of everyone in zipcode abcde.

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