Just in case anyone would ask 'why' or 'where's the money': - even privacy conscious people give their location data to their map app - google maps + google s

Just in case anyone would ask 'why' or 'where's the money': - even privacy conscious people give their location data to their map app - google maps + google services (android) do everything they can to collect your location data even while not using the app - how to monetize that data? Measuring online-to-offline conversions! Store visits. This is what retail is after. Anyone can take $5M for an ad campaign, but if there is a single company that can prove that their ads deliver people to the stores, they get the money and they make case for getting more next time. To paraphrase Zenyep Tufekci, we're not just building dystopia to make people click ads, we're also surveilling bilions of people to measure retail ad conversions. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy... (oh, and there will be a lot of byproducts of course, as the article mentions. Some of them will even be great PR, such as the self-driving cars)