Investigation exposes multibillion-dollar market to sell usersโ location data
"Thereโs a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phoneโs Location Data" 30 September 2021
Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated $12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firmsโฆ
Location firm Near describes itself as โThe Worldโs Largest Dataset of Peopleโs Behavior in the Real-World,โ with data representing โ1.6B people across 44 countries.โ Mobilewalla boasts โ40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.โ X-Modeโs website claims its data covers โ25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.โ
... But unbeknownst to most users, some of those apps sell or share location data about their users with companies that analyze the data and sell their insightsโฆ
Once a personโs location data has been collected from an app and it has entered the location data marketplace, it can be sold over and over again, from the data providers to an aggregator that resells data from multiple sourcesโฆ
There are a whole slew of potential buyers for location data: investors looking for intel on market trends or what their competitors are up to, political campaigns, stores keeping tabs on customers, and law enforcement agencies, among others.