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How are they gathering this data? Are they placing detection equipment at/near the target locations to monitor for cell phone signatures in the vicinity, or ar
by blantonl 8y ago
How are they gathering this data?
Are they placing detection equipment at/near the target locations to monitor for cell phone signatures in the vicinity, or are they gathering from mobile apps who resell location data to aggregation firms?
- Redoubts 8y agoProbably just buying it from carriers directly. https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-selling-your-location-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel...
- whorleater 8y agoYou can buy location data from companies that buy it from carriers, some weather companies, and some advertising companies. If you're an oil trader, you almost certainly have the resources required to accept all these feeds and clean + cross ref them for a couple hundred locations.
- AznHisoka 8y agoGoogle “Thasos Group”. They are one of the big providers
- dustindiamond 8y agoDo you know what the pricing is like? I assume there is a geofencing API call that returns a bunch of GUIDs and another that takes a GUID and gives a location with last time seen?
- djsumdog 8y agoYea that wasn't clear. The article made it sound like they're aggregating data from various sources that collect location data (probably from those app metric providers like Tune and others). So if someone ran an open source phone with F-Droid or just installed zero apps with metrics (and Google isn't one of their sources), they wouldn't ever show up in this data set. I'm guessing location data comes from the Apple/Google location APIs that can map peoples aprox locations based on their proximity to Wi-Fi points (I think they register Wi-Fi points and then the first GPS signal the phone gets after; like when someone walks outside, and use a set of those to get approximate triangulation for indoor Wi-Fi APs).
- londons_explore 8y agoGoogle and apple done sell data from their location APIs that would be suitable for this. I reckon it'll be coming from catriers
- tantalor 8y ago"through vendors" (sloppy reporting, passive voice)
- AznHisoka 8y agoThey didnt disclose the vendors because they actually are reselling the same data in their Bloomberg terminal :)
- a3n 8y agoThe article mentioned apps. Are your apps only doing what you think they do?
- aaron695 8y agoSecond (aggregation firms) - http://thasosgroup.com/blog/thasos-data-tesla-wsj/ http://thasosgroup.com/blog/thasos-data-tesla-wsj/