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I suspect that Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T also have data.

• nopriorarrests 8y ago
  True, but being old and slow telco businesses they totally failed to monetize it. Verizon bought AOl, HuffPost, Techcrunch and plenty of other media to build an advertising giant by pairing data with sites audience -- and took 4.6 BILLION WRITEDOWN on the whole venture [1] because failed to make it work. [1] https://www.recode.net/2018/12/11/18136127/verizon-aol-yahoo-writedown-5-billion https://www.recode.net/2018/12/11/18136127/verizon-aol-yahoo... EDIT: oh and AT&T will learn the same lesson with their recent 800M AppNexus aquisition. Just give it time.
  • ceejayoz 8y ago
    They didn't totally fail to monetize it: https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/carriers-were-selling-your-location-data-to-bounty-hunters-for-y/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/carriers-were-selling-yo... > Carriers sell information about you to data aggregators, which normally require the user to consent before selling it on further. But some third parties opted to sell information, like people's whereabouts, on to bodies such as bail bond companies, bounty hunters and landlords. In its original report, Motherboard paid an bounty hunter $300 to get the location of a phone to within a few hundred meters.
    • nopriorarrests 8y ago
      They totally failed to monetize it for advertising purposes. Taking cases like $300 per single person location, paid by bounty hunter, is arguing in a bad faith, and has nothing to do with ad-tech.
      • treis 8y ago
        >They totally failed to monetize it for advertising purposes It has been illegal for them to do so until relatively recently.
        • drewmol 8y ago
          It will be interesting to see how the mobile operators now try to monitize their 1985 - 2007 location data collected b4 GOOG/FB were in the game, will they just sell it to Google?
• weinzierl 8y ago
  And don't forget the browser plugins that siphon your data.