A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’s movements

Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.”

Fast food restaurants and other businesses have been known to buy location data for advertising purposes down to a person’s steps. For example, in 2018, Burger King ran a promotion in which, if a customer’s phone was within 600 feet of a McDonalds, the Burger King app would let the user buy a Whopper for one cent.

Outlogic (formerly known as X-Mode) offers a license for a location dataset titled “Cyber Security Location data” on Datarade for $240,000 per year. The listing says “Outlogic’s accurate and granular location data is collected directly from a mobile device’s GPS.”

  • interdimensionalmeme
    2·
    11 months ago

    Yes, 3 towers just need to know how strong your signal is, the intersection of 3 circle is where you are.

    But for a long time, antenna towers have multiple antenna, so each tower know your azimuth and distance on its own.

    There is no escape. This is why ham radio was kneecapped too.

      • interdimensionalmeme
        1·
        11 months ago

        By forbidding encryption so that hans can’t carry civil internet. And then by not using bandwidth, ham get confined to smaller and smaller sections of the spectrum.