8 ms·

Confessions of a location data exec

205 points by ilamont 8y ago

kuhhk 8y ago
> they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake. No one has stopped to think about where that data has come from and why a publisher would choose to sell it all to a vendor who is going to build a business on top of their data. What’s actually happening is these ad tech vendors are trying to pad out the limited data they already own with other data sets from competitive vendors or other unknown sources. Sounds more like textbook fraud than a Ponzi scheme (though, honestly I did not read the whole article).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- PLenz 8y ago
  Not really fraud, phones have different levels of horizontal accuracy based off of privacy settings, GPS & cell signal strength, battery life, CPU load and that's before you get to the obfuscation that exchanges do. At Dstillery we built a geodata classifier to tell us what was and what wasn't good data. We throw out 60% to 75% a day as not useful for learning anything from. But we can be picky since we combine web and location data we aren't beholden to needing the unreasonable amounts of location data you need working with just location data. Location should be holistic part of the data, not the be-all, end-all.
  - PLenz 8y ago
    It should also be noted that we have anti fraud tech baked into our system that fires before our geodata stuff runs. Fraud gets cleared out for being fraud not for being bad location data.
StrictDabbler 8y ago
This doesn't seem to describe a Ponzi scheme. Money from later investors is not used to pay returns to earlier investors. Contrariwise, if location data from later subscribers were used to provide solid information to earlier subscribers that would be an effective and useful service. If there is collusion to both sell fake data and detect fake data that is indeed fraud, but it's a different kind of fraud.
- derefr 8y ago
  What the article is getting at, is that the service makes promises based on the assumption that later subscribers will show up to provide enough data to satisfy the SLA they give to the early subscribers, before those early subscribers attempt to "call them on it" (by i.e. actually attempting to use the less-common data sets in production.) If the later subscribers don't come, the service will eventually be found useless for the early subscribers, and so they've paid in for nothing. Thus, like in a (complete-knowledge) Ponzi scheme, the early subscribers have an incentive to get later subscribers to sign up for the service, so that it can be more useful for them. But, unlike in a Ponzi scheme, the later subscribers don't have to wait for subscribers even later than them, before they can benefit. The later you subscribe, the more immediate value the system has to you.
  - mfoy_ 8y ago
    It's more like "trying to kickstart the network effect". It's kind of like how dating services buy and sell portfolios of user accounts so that they can pre-seed their services with apparent potential matches, thus attracting real users who will (hopefully) become the real userbase.
  - bregma 8y ago
    I believe that's called "an investment" -- you put resources in, hoping to get them back again plus more. The possibility of losing your principle is called "risk". It's about as much of a Ponzi scheme as, say, a day at the track.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      If you paid for a service, but got an investment, that's not exactly on the up-and-up. If that money is then used to try to work towards what they've sold you as currently available, that's not exactly a Ponzi scheme, but it does share quite a few similarities. IMO, equating it to betting at the track isn't very accurate. Most people that bet at the track know they are taking on risk of no return, and what they gain for that is increased payout. Where's the knowledge here that you might not get what you paid for? What's the benefit of taking on this risk? Is it still betting if you buy something at a store and the shopkeeper turns around and puts the money into a slot machine before you've been given what you paid for and before know what's going on?
boxcardavin 8y ago
I think we all know what the quote is about even though it's not an actual Ponzi scheme, it's just fraud. Another good reminder to question everything, especially group wisdom.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Adtech industry is about tools for things of questionable ethics. You shouldn't expect people doing and selling that to be paragons of honesty, who won't use their tools and methods against competition and customers within the industry. Reminds me of this story about why whales don't die of cancer: because they're so large, that by the time their cancer grows to be dangerous, it gets its own cancer and dies.
  - tareqak 8y ago
    I looked up your story ("whales don't die of cancer" on duckduckgo), and found it: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151031-the-animal-that-doesnt-get-cancer http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151031-the-animal-that-does... .
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      The possible explanation of this (Peto's paradox) I mentioned was something I read on SlateStarCodex once, and it's from this paper: https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/47/2/317/719209 https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/47/2/317/719209. I don't think this hypothesis is widely accepted, but I remembered it because it's neat, and fits the game-theoretic model of cooperation/defection perfectly - which also makes it extremely useful for drawing analogies.
      - 1zee 8y ago
        Can you elaborate on the analogy in the context of this thread?
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
nopriorarrests 8y ago
so much true. people are worried about their data being sold to advertisers, while the little dirty secret of the ad-tech industry is that nobody has any data, tbh. facebook and google do, but they are not selling it. and the rest of ad-tech loves to boast about their "data" on every conference while all they have is /dev/random output, more or less.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  Until flashlight apps stop trying to request location data, I do not feel it's safe to assume the industry has no data
  - nopriorarrests 8y ago
    Well, yes, let's say that your flashlight app requested your location data and you agreed. You were in a park during dawn and you were looking for the stairs. And there were like 2 ads shown to you during this 50 seconds period, while you were in the dark and not looking at your phone but using it as a duh, flashlight. And then you stopped the app to save your battery. Do you really think some advertiser benefited by using this data? And what "independent" ad-tech is dealing with is millions of cases above. Consistency is important. FB and GOOG have consistent data, collected over days and years, properly matched, correctly aggregated. All others are dealing with flashlight crap.
    - mrguyorama 8y ago
      For plenty of people, apps can still get background location data.
      - _underfl0w_ 8y ago
        This. A lot of those arguing your parent comment's point in other threads here and elsewhere seem to magically forget background data. Out of sight, out of mind. Use a simple app to track background connections on your phone (e.g. NetGuard or the like) and you'd be amazed at how much gets sent back to the mothership.
peterholcomb 8y ago
Not a ponzi scheme...just fraud. Not sure why they went with the clickbaity title.
- _underfl0w_ 8y ago
  It's literally about advertising, i.e. getting people to click on stuff they otherwise wouldn't.
raverbashing 8y ago
To be honest 90% of the ad/location hypertargeting seems to be grasping at straws and much less effective than people think it is. Retargeting/rebrokering it for ever smaller margins doesn't seem to make sense (except for those selling that snake oil). Volume and campaign quality count more than just getting the exact words and the exact public (and remember you're paying more for a more targeted ad), targeted ads of course work for a targeted segment/audience, for most products that you would find in a high street/main street store, not really.
Illniyar 8y ago
"they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake." Isn't 80% fake data (i.e. bot clicks, auto play video counting, etc...) on par for the ad industry?
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Location aggregation companies, like Yelp and Foursquare, actually do have large enough scale in terms of always-on location trail data to legitimately attempt this type of targeting. Combined with the fact that you’re giving them free data about your visits to places, your tastes, your likely income level based on where you shop, your home location, and from this they could reasonably predict your gender and put you into all sorts of specific advertiser buckets, it’s frankly perfectly reasonable to claim you could use it for ad targeting or measuring ad campaigns, even with a low match rate against the advertiser’s actual list of customers (under 1% surely). To boot, Foursquare at least, and probably Yelp too, does data swapping and SDK agreements, like some thing recently announced with Accuweather (gross) and with Hilton Hotels. I think people sincerely fail to imagine the real scope of this type of egregious trust violation and surveillance business model. You can dress it up with whatever language you want about providing value to the user that makes them agreeable to the data collection terms, but I’m sure half of Foursquare users or Yelp users don’t actually know if they have the background location tracking disabled or not, or what other innocuous-seeming apps are silently feeding location pings to build a Foursquare data history about you to make you targetable for ads. Frankly, I’d personally advise anyone to absolutely delete these apps or anything like them, and essentially vote with your wallet / vote by boycott and just refuse any apps that rely on this kind of business model. [0]: https://www.adweek.com/digital/foursquare-will-fuel-accuweathers-new-location-based-recommendations/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/foursquare-will-fuel-accuweat...
bastawhiz 8y ago
I pay a lot of attention to stuff like this because it's something my customers ask for. Podcasters pay good money to hosting services for demographic data on listeners. There's no good way to get that data: podcasts are RSS feeds. You see IPs and user agents. How do they know who's a 30 year old male making $70,000? You an try to match IPs with advertising databases, but good luck getting any sort of real signal out of that. That data is all inferred anyway. Hell, I bet my cell phone has two dozen IPs over the course of an average day as I connect to various wifi networks and Fi switches carriers. And yet, people build million dollar businesses on this stuff. Blows my mind. Edit: And yes, sometimes people play podcasts via players on the web. This makes up a tiny fraction of overall listens. It's not statistically significant.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Speaking of carriers, some have been known to inject IDs into their users' requests, so that site owners can later buy those profiles from them: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/verizon-wireless-injects-identifiers-link-its-users-to-web-requests/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/veriz... That's one way to get that data.
  - m463 8y ago
    also CDNs, like akamai.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  There's no good way to get that data: podcasts are RSS feeds. You see IPs and user agents. How do they know who's a 30 year old male making $70,000? You an try to match IPs with advertising databases, but good luck getting any sort of real signal out of that. That data is all inferred anyway. Hell, I bet my cell phone has two dozen IPs over the course of an average day as I connect to various wifi networks and Fi switches carriers. As it damn well should be. That said, it's only a matter of time before carriers start tracking and selling this data.
  - manigandham 8y ago
eiji 8y ago
The Google Opinion Rewards app seems to ask questions related to this all the time. Anybody know more about that? 5 out of 10 "surveys" go like this: Which of the following places did you visit recently? Yes? How did you pay? (Credit card, debit card, cash, made no payment, …).
alexrage 8y ago
This is mostly pervasive because of agency/client relationships. Most clients go to an agency with a budget, and the agency, in good faith, is out there paying location data services to target their ads. Then a report is generated, passed to the client along some sort KPI that increased, and everyone is happy. This fraud exists because the market allows it.
sherlock_h 8y ago
Or you buy all the location data from everyone who is selling, construct a mega panel and try to pitch hedgefunds with your data: http://thasosgroup.com/ http://thasosgroup.com/
reilly3000 8y ago
One of the main promises of hyper-local geotargeting was the ability to build audience pools based off of location data that could be correlated with inferred home location mashed up with Zillow data to provide home value and estimated equity. On paper this kind of targeting would be really appealing to home improvement chains, banks, and even restaurants. I never really bought that way when I was a media buyer, so I can't say if it was ever effective. That said, I imagine it was more compelling to marketers when the data was sourced from a few trusted entities. Now, practically every free-to-play android app is asking for location data 24/7, no doubt to be sold to data exchanges. Once a location data relationship is established with an app publisher, there really is nothing stopping them from feeding psuedo-random location pings and getting paid for it. Its just another form of ad fraud. I wouldn't recommend a major digital buy to my worst enemy these days; Facebook lies about their metrics, Google sticks your ads next to child porn, display has been destroyed by domain spoofing and arbitrage. Maybe good old-fashioned direct buys with publishers are still safe, but there is a reason why TV budgets have held strong.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  This just kicks the can one level down the road. Aggregator companies like PlaceIQ, Foursquare and Yelp will act as the intermediary and create more rigorous ways to detect spammy / useless location signals, and smooth out location tracking data. Those intermediaries are the main worries, because brands or marketers may not trust every random Android app, but they will trust Yelp or Foursquare or something, and frankly given additional scale from data bartering and SDK pings that send back location from many other apps, places like Foursquare or Yelp really can provide targeting services that come close to what adtech has always promised. To be clear, I’d consider this a bad thing, because places like Foursquare or Yelp, whatever they may say to put a PR spin on it, are quite literally preying on people who unwittingly share their location data and don’t really understand the terms, especially not when it’s some tertiary SDK traffic logs agreement causing some music app or hotel app or weather app to send them data tied to your IP address or device ID. If those businesses can’t monetize their basic value proposition, like a app to search reviews of restaurants, it’s a signal to delete & shutdown the app... but unfortunately it’s become the reverse: a signal to abandon investment into the actual user and diversify all kinds of deceitful behind the scenes ways of getting user data and making users into the product.
scarejunba 8y ago
Haha, total and utter bullshit. Someone is pulling a fast one on this sucker of a journalist. You don’t need location turned on to see where someone is lat/long. An average engineer can think of a dozen methods in half an hour.
- manigandham 8y ago
  You could've stated that better but yes, there are many ways to get location signal from mobile phones. Also people do have plenty of apps running and between all the SDKs embedded inside, there is location data being sent all the time.
voycey 8y ago
As an Location Data Exec I can say that so much of what he 'assumes' here is utter tripe. There is no need to have the phone in hand with the application open in order to collect location data - we get billions of signals from first party data from background usage on both iOS and Android. These SDK's require legitimate usage of GPS in order to deliver the functions that we provide - our permission requests are overt and informational - we let users know exactly what data they will be sending and how we use it (one of our products actually rewards users for doing this!). True, Apple and Android are both cracking down on un-authorised usage and collection of this data, it just means you have to follow some more rules in order to collect this data. Either way it is good for user transparency. It sounds like (for the most part) he is talking about bid stream data, which everyone in the industry knows is the sewerage of the location data industry. Sure you can get a few valuable insights from it - but should it be classed as location data? No way. Even with significant cleansing it is still mostly garbage. If that is what their entire business model is based upon then no wonder it feels like a ponzi scheme to him. For the rest of the location world who are using quality data - we see things differently!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- NipunSingh 8y ago
  Not an exec but work in the geospatial data space. Our company did an analysis of bid-stream data and came to the same conclusion that less than 10% of bid stream data is high quality. https://blog.safegraph.com/less-than-10-of-bid-stream-location-data-is-high-quality-and-we-know-how-to-find-it-3a2c0df35475 https://blog.safegraph.com/less-than-10-of-bid-stream-locati...
  - voycey 8y ago
    Yep we know your company very well - we came to the same conclusions, even despite the heavy cleansing methods people purport to undertake it is still garbage!
- andrenotgiant 8y ago
manigandham 8y ago
As someone who has contributed several articles to this "Confessions" series, beware that they're designed to highlight the worst-of-the-worst situation. It's true that there are many junk vendors. Heavy politics and misaligned incentives for ad agencies usually means that the bad companies do better than the trusted vendors because fake data can obviously be shaped to look better than the real results. That being said, location data does work. There are many ways to collect it from visual scanners in doorways, to open wifi networks that ping phones, to ISPs enriching data feeds. There are also 1000s of analytics SDKs embedded in apps that send pings constantly, so having a specific app open is not a necessity and never actually used by any serious network. Pretending that's the only way it works is just misleading.

205 points by ilamont 8y ago

> they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake. No one has stopped to think about where that data has come from and why a publisher would choose to sell it all to a vendor who is going to build a business on top of their data. What’s actually happening is these ad tech vendors are trying to pad out the limited data they already own with other data sets from competitive vendors or other unknown sources. Sounds more like textbook fraud than a Ponzi scheme (though, honestly I did not read the whole article).

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
PLenz 8y ago
Not really fraud, phones have different levels of horizontal accuracy based off of privacy settings, GPS & cell signal strength, battery life, CPU load and that's before you get to the obfuscation that exchanges do. At Dstillery we built a geodata classifier to tell us what was and what wasn't good data. We throw out 60% to 75% a day as not useful for learning anything from. But we can be picky since we combine web and location data we aren't beholden to needing the unreasonable amounts of location data you need working with just location data. Location should be holistic part of the data, not the be-all, end-all.
- PLenz 8y ago
  It should also be noted that we have anti fraud tech baked into our system that fires before our geodata stuff runs. Fraud gets cleared out for being fraud not for being bad location data.

StrictDabbler 8y ago

This doesn't seem to describe a Ponzi scheme. Money from later investors is not used to pay returns to earlier investors. Contrariwise, if location data from later subscribers were used to provide solid information to earlier subscribers that would be an effective and useful service. If there is collusion to both sell fake data and detect fake data that is indeed fraud, but it's a different kind of fraud.

derefr 8y ago
What the article is getting at, is that the service makes promises based on the assumption that later subscribers will show up to provide enough data to satisfy the SLA they give to the early subscribers, before those early subscribers attempt to "call them on it" (by i.e. actually attempting to use the less-common data sets in production.) If the later subscribers don't come, the service will eventually be found useless for the early subscribers, and so they've paid in for nothing. Thus, like in a (complete-knowledge) Ponzi scheme, the early subscribers have an incentive to get later subscribers to sign up for the service, so that it can be more useful for them. But, unlike in a Ponzi scheme, the later subscribers don't have to wait for subscribers even later than them, before they can benefit. The later you subscribe, the more immediate value the system has to you.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  It's more like "trying to kickstart the network effect". It's kind of like how dating services buy and sell portfolios of user accounts so that they can pre-seed their services with apparent potential matches, thus attracting real users who will (hopefully) become the real userbase.
- bregma 8y ago
  I believe that's called "an investment" -- you put resources in, hoping to get them back again plus more. The possibility of losing your principle is called "risk". It's about as much of a Ponzi scheme as, say, a day at the track.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    If you paid for a service, but got an investment, that's not exactly on the up-and-up. If that money is then used to try to work towards what they've sold you as currently available, that's not exactly a Ponzi scheme, but it does share quite a few similarities. IMO, equating it to betting at the track isn't very accurate. Most people that bet at the track know they are taking on risk of no return, and what they gain for that is increased payout. Where's the knowledge here that you might not get what you paid for? What's the benefit of taking on this risk? Is it still betting if you buy something at a store and the shopkeeper turns around and puts the money into a slot machine before you've been given what you paid for and before know what's going on?

boxcardavin 8y ago

I think we all know what the quote is about even though it's not an actual Ponzi scheme, it's just fraud. Another good reminder to question everything, especially group wisdom.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Adtech industry is about tools for things of questionable ethics. You shouldn't expect people doing and selling that to be paragons of honesty, who won't use their tools and methods against competition and customers within the industry. Reminds me of this story about why whales don't die of cancer: because they're so large, that by the time their cancer grows to be dangerous, it gets its own cancer and dies.
- tareqak 8y ago
  I looked up your story ("whales don't die of cancer" on duckduckgo), and found it: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151031-the-animal-that-doesnt-get-cancer http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151031-the-animal-that-does... .
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    The possible explanation of this (Peto's paradox) I mentioned was something I read on SlateStarCodex once, and it's from this paper: https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/47/2/317/719209 https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/47/2/317/719209. I don't think this hypothesis is widely accepted, but I remembered it because it's neat, and fits the game-theoretic model of cooperation/defection perfectly - which also makes it extremely useful for drawing analogies.
    - 1zee 8y ago
      Can you elaborate on the analogy in the context of this thread?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago

nopriorarrests 8y ago

so much true. people are worried about their data being sold to advertisers, while the little dirty secret of the ad-tech industry is that nobody has any data, tbh. facebook and google do, but they are not selling it. and the rest of ad-tech loves to boast about their "data" on every conference while all they have is /dev/random output, more or less.

mrguyorama 8y ago
Until flashlight apps stop trying to request location data, I do not feel it's safe to assume the industry has no data
- nopriorarrests 8y ago
  Well, yes, let's say that your flashlight app requested your location data and you agreed. You were in a park during dawn and you were looking for the stairs. And there were like 2 ads shown to you during this 50 seconds period, while you were in the dark and not looking at your phone but using it as a duh, flashlight. And then you stopped the app to save your battery. Do you really think some advertiser benefited by using this data? And what "independent" ad-tech is dealing with is millions of cases above. Consistency is important. FB and GOOG have consistent data, collected over days and years, properly matched, correctly aggregated. All others are dealing with flashlight crap.
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    For plenty of people, apps can still get background location data.
    - _underfl0w_ 8y ago
      This. A lot of those arguing your parent comment's point in other threads here and elsewhere seem to magically forget background data. Out of sight, out of mind. Use a simple app to track background connections on your phone (e.g. NetGuard or the like) and you'd be amazed at how much gets sent back to the mothership.

peterholcomb 8y ago

Not a ponzi scheme...just fraud. Not sure why they went with the clickbaity title.

_underfl0w_ 8y ago
It's literally about advertising, i.e. getting people to click on stuff they otherwise wouldn't.

raverbashing 8y ago

To be honest 90% of the ad/location hypertargeting seems to be grasping at straws and much less effective than people think it is. Retargeting/rebrokering it for ever smaller margins doesn't seem to make sense (except for those selling that snake oil). Volume and campaign quality count more than just getting the exact words and the exact public (and remember you're paying more for a more targeted ad), targeted ads of course work for a targeted segment/audience, for most products that you would find in a high street/main street store, not really.

Illniyar 8y ago

"they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake." Isn't 80% fake data (i.e. bot clicks, auto play video counting, etc...) on par for the ad industry?

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Location aggregation companies, like Yelp and Foursquare, actually do have large enough scale in terms of always-on location trail data to legitimately attempt this type of targeting. Combined with the fact that you’re giving them free data about your visits to places, your tastes, your likely income level based on where you shop, your home location, and from this they could reasonably predict your gender and put you into all sorts of specific advertiser buckets, it’s frankly perfectly reasonable to claim you could use it for ad targeting or measuring ad campaigns, even with a low match rate against the advertiser’s actual list of customers (under 1% surely). To boot, Foursquare at least, and probably Yelp too, does data swapping and SDK agreements, like some thing recently announced with Accuweather (gross) and with Hilton Hotels. I think people sincerely fail to imagine the real scope of this type of egregious trust violation and surveillance business model. You can dress it up with whatever language you want about providing value to the user that makes them agreeable to the data collection terms, but I’m sure half of Foursquare users or Yelp users don’t actually know if they have the background location tracking disabled or not, or what other innocuous-seeming apps are silently feeding location pings to build a Foursquare data history about you to make you targetable for ads. Frankly, I’d personally advise anyone to absolutely delete these apps or anything like them, and essentially vote with your wallet / vote by boycott and just refuse any apps that rely on this kind of business model. [0]: https://www.adweek.com/digital/foursquare-will-fuel-accuweathers-new-location-based-recommendations/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/foursquare-will-fuel-accuweat...

bastawhiz 8y ago

I pay a lot of attention to stuff like this because it's something my customers ask for. Podcasters pay good money to hosting services for demographic data on listeners. There's no good way to get that data: podcasts are RSS feeds. You see IPs and user agents. How do they know who's a 30 year old male making $70,000? You an try to match IPs with advertising databases, but good luck getting any sort of real signal out of that. That data is all inferred anyway. Hell, I bet my cell phone has two dozen IPs over the course of an average day as I connect to various wifi networks and Fi switches carriers. And yet, people build million dollar businesses on this stuff. Blows my mind. Edit: And yes, sometimes people play podcasts via players on the web. This makes up a tiny fraction of overall listens. It's not statistically significant.

icebraining 8y ago
Speaking of carriers, some have been known to inject IDs into their users' requests, so that site owners can later buy those profiles from them: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/verizon-wireless-injects-identifiers-link-its-users-to-web-requests/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/veriz... That's one way to get that data.
- m463 8y ago
  also CDNs, like akamai.
nerdponx 8y ago
There's no good way to get that data: podcasts are RSS feeds. You see IPs and user agents. How do they know who's a 30 year old male making $70,000? You an try to match IPs with advertising databases, but good luck getting any sort of real signal out of that. That data is all inferred anyway. Hell, I bet my cell phone has two dozen IPs over the course of an average day as I connect to various wifi networks and Fi switches carriers. As it damn well should be. That said, it's only a matter of time before carriers start tracking and selling this data.
- manigandham 8y ago

eiji 8y ago

The Google Opinion Rewards app seems to ask questions related to this all the time. Anybody know more about that? 5 out of 10 "surveys" go like this: Which of the following places did you visit recently? Yes? How did you pay? (Credit card, debit card, cash, made no payment, …).

alexrage 8y ago

This is mostly pervasive because of agency/client relationships. Most clients go to an agency with a budget, and the agency, in good faith, is out there paying location data services to target their ads. Then a report is generated, passed to the client along some sort KPI that increased, and everyone is happy. This fraud exists because the market allows it.

sherlock_h 8y ago

Or you buy all the location data from everyone who is selling, construct a mega panel and try to pitch hedgefunds with your data: http://thasosgroup.com/ http://thasosgroup.com/

reilly3000 8y ago

One of the main promises of hyper-local geotargeting was the ability to build audience pools based off of location data that could be correlated with inferred home location mashed up with Zillow data to provide home value and estimated equity. On paper this kind of targeting would be really appealing to home improvement chains, banks, and even restaurants. I never really bought that way when I was a media buyer, so I can't say if it was ever effective. That said, I imagine it was more compelling to marketers when the data was sourced from a few trusted entities. Now, practically every free-to-play android app is asking for location data 24/7, no doubt to be sold to data exchanges. Once a location data relationship is established with an app publisher, there really is nothing stopping them from feeding psuedo-random location pings and getting paid for it. Its just another form of ad fraud. I wouldn't recommend a major digital buy to my worst enemy these days; Facebook lies about their metrics, Google sticks your ads next to child porn, display has been destroyed by domain spoofing and arbitrage. Maybe good old-fashioned direct buys with publishers are still safe, but there is a reason why TV budgets have held strong.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
This just kicks the can one level down the road. Aggregator companies like PlaceIQ, Foursquare and Yelp will act as the intermediary and create more rigorous ways to detect spammy / useless location signals, and smooth out location tracking data. Those intermediaries are the main worries, because brands or marketers may not trust every random Android app, but they will trust Yelp or Foursquare or something, and frankly given additional scale from data bartering and SDK pings that send back location from many other apps, places like Foursquare or Yelp really can provide targeting services that come close to what adtech has always promised. To be clear, I’d consider this a bad thing, because places like Foursquare or Yelp, whatever they may say to put a PR spin on it, are quite literally preying on people who unwittingly share their location data and don’t really understand the terms, especially not when it’s some tertiary SDK traffic logs agreement causing some music app or hotel app or weather app to send them data tied to your IP address or device ID. If those businesses can’t monetize their basic value proposition, like a app to search reviews of restaurants, it’s a signal to delete & shutdown the app... but unfortunately it’s become the reverse: a signal to abandon investment into the actual user and diversify all kinds of deceitful behind the scenes ways of getting user data and making users into the product.

scarejunba 8y ago

Haha, total and utter bullshit. Someone is pulling a fast one on this sucker of a journalist. You don’t need location turned on to see where someone is lat/long. An average engineer can think of a dozen methods in half an hour.

manigandham 8y ago
You could've stated that better but yes, there are many ways to get location signal from mobile phones. Also people do have plenty of apps running and between all the SDKs embedded inside, there is location data being sent all the time.

voycey 8y ago

As an Location Data Exec I can say that so much of what he 'assumes' here is utter tripe. There is no need to have the phone in hand with the application open in order to collect location data - we get billions of signals from first party data from background usage on both iOS and Android. These SDK's require legitimate usage of GPS in order to deliver the functions that we provide - our permission requests are overt and informational - we let users know exactly what data they will be sending and how we use it (one of our products actually rewards users for doing this!). True, Apple and Android are both cracking down on un-authorised usage and collection of this data, it just means you have to follow some more rules in order to collect this data. Either way it is good for user transparency. It sounds like (for the most part) he is talking about bid stream data, which everyone in the industry knows is the sewerage of the location data industry. Sure you can get a few valuable insights from it - but should it be classed as location data? No way. Even with significant cleansing it is still mostly garbage. If that is what their entire business model is based upon then no wonder it feels like a ponzi scheme to him. For the rest of the location world who are using quality data - we see things differently!

deleted 8y ago
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NipunSingh 8y ago
Not an exec but work in the geospatial data space. Our company did an analysis of bid-stream data and came to the same conclusion that less than 10% of bid stream data is high quality. https://blog.safegraph.com/less-than-10-of-bid-stream-location-data-is-high-quality-and-we-know-how-to-find-it-3a2c0df35475 https://blog.safegraph.com/less-than-10-of-bid-stream-locati...
- voycey 8y ago
  Yep we know your company very well - we came to the same conclusions, even despite the heavy cleansing methods people purport to undertake it is still garbage!
andrenotgiant 8y ago

manigandham 8y ago

As someone who has contributed several articles to this "Confessions" series, beware that they're designed to highlight the worst-of-the-worst situation. It's true that there are many junk vendors. Heavy politics and misaligned incentives for ad agencies usually means that the bad companies do better than the trusted vendors because fake data can obviously be shaped to look better than the real results. That being said, location data does work. There are many ways to collect it from visual scanners in doorways, to open wifi networks that ping phones, to ISPs enriching data feeds. There are also 1000s of analytics SDKs embedded in apps that send pings constantly, so having a specific app open is not a necessity and never actually used by any serious network. Pretending that's the only way it works is just misleading.