Lets say we have a company and I'll make up a name for them: Perizon. Perizon sells you phones and also collects your location whenever your phone is on. Perizon then sells this data to the USG and anybody (ex. journalists) claiming to be bounty hunters.
Continuing the story, lets say we have a company and I'll make up another name for them: Scroogle. Scroogle operates a popular website and collects your location whenever your phone connects to the website. Scroogle does not sell this data to the USG.
Which company is complicit in the widespread sale of data? Perizon has it's own data ingest system separate from Scroogles. It's always been separate and it's been operating for decades; Scroogle is not complicit in Perizon's decisions.
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Now, there is certainly an arguement that Scroogle shouldn't collect all the data it does. But lets be calling a Spade a Spade here; Perizon is the company that fits your description.
The reality is this. Perizon sells you a phone with the ability to track your location. They do it. Websites do it. Apps do it. Let’s focus on the websites for a second. When you visit a website, you give up information about your device. User-Agent, device, maybe your location as well but definitely your IP address. This goes into a giant data lake where they can cross this with multiple other websites to determine if it’s “you”. Once determined, they put together a profile of you - your sites, apps, locations, buying habits, search history, demographics, income history, you name it - from multiple data brokers and sources. Then this profile is bundled and sold.
How do I know? I briefly worked for a company that enabled this. I didn’t stay.
You got hired at (the fictional company) Scroogle and can verify that they produced a data lake and then sell nice zip drives of that data to people?
I have no doubt that out of all the websites in existence some collect your location and sell it to any bidders. My point is that if you focus on the actual ad-platforms the behavior of selling location data is not what they do. If you have a problem with people selling location data you should be focusing on people selling location data and not some nebulous "ad-tech". Perizon does not validate if you're using the location data to catch criminals, sell shoes, or find your wife to beat her to death. Even without "ad-tech" Perizon still has a financial incentive to sell your data.
Continuing the story, lets say we have a company and I'll make up another name for them: Scroogle. Scroogle operates a popular website and collects your location whenever your phone connects to the website. Scroogle does not sell this data to the USG.
Which company is complicit in the widespread sale of data? Perizon has it's own data ingest system separate from Scroogles. It's always been separate and it's been operating for decades; Scroogle is not complicit in Perizon's decisions.
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Now, there is certainly an arguement that Scroogle shouldn't collect all the data it does. But lets be calling a Spade a Spade here; Perizon is the company that fits your description.