4 ms·

I'll bite. Where I live and where I shop, I can understand. But how does my cell phone know how much money I make?

gregsadetsky 5y ago
It might correlate it with other vendors and signals (e.g., your trail of visited web sites, completed purchases, etc.) and also deduce it by monitoring your geo position to find where your “home” is (wherever you spend most nights / wherever you use your apps late or early in the day) and then use zip code area demographics to get the average income for that area. Oh… and, credit card companies selling data (to these same data aggregators) on their members’ buying habits and most probably demographics as well (age, income, etc.)
autoexec 5y ago
It's crazy how much just having your location tracked 24/7 shows about you. It can give a pretty good idea of if you're in a relationship and sexually active (where you spend your nights and when/how often), if your parents are dead and if you're married or divorced (where you go for holidays and when you stop going there), what your life expectancy is (your zip code), if you have children (when and how often you visit schools, day care centers and play grounds/chucky cheese), what you do for a living (harder now that more folks work from home), how healthy you are (time spent at doctors/hospitals/fast food restaurants/gyms), etc. Tracking one person's location history is invasive enough, but if they're also tracking the people around you it gets a whole lot easier. Phones spend time talking to and tracking other phones around them (even when those devices are offline or have location services disabled) along with being tracked by Bluetooth beacons and collecting info about nearby wifi connections.
mhuffman 5y ago
There are other companies that keep track of that (experian, trans union, quick books, etc) that get this from everything from your employer's bookkeeping software to your credit applications. And they sell your data. So if they know where you live and an app knows where you live ...
aboodman 5y ago
They can tell by where you shop and where you live.

It might correlate it with other vendors and signals (e.g., your trail of visited web sites, completed purchases, etc.) and also deduce it by monitoring your geo position to find where your “home” is (wherever you spend most nights / wherever you use your apps late or early in the day) and then use zip code area demographics to get the average income for that area. Oh… and, credit card companies selling data (to these same data aggregators) on their members’ buying habits and most probably demographics as well (age, income, etc.)

autoexec 5y ago

It's crazy how much just having your location tracked 24/7 shows about you. It can give a pretty good idea of if you're in a relationship and sexually active (where you spend your nights and when/how often), if your parents are dead and if you're married or divorced (where you go for holidays and when you stop going there), what your life expectancy is (your zip code), if you have children (when and how often you visit schools, day care centers and play grounds/chucky cheese), what you do for a living (harder now that more folks work from home), how healthy you are (time spent at doctors/hospitals/fast food restaurants/gyms), etc. Tracking one person's location history is invasive enough, but if they're also tracking the people around you it gets a whole lot easier. Phones spend time talking to and tracking other phones around them (even when those devices are offline or have location services disabled) along with being tracked by Bluetooth beacons and collecting info about nearby wifi connections.

mhuffman 5y ago

There are other companies that keep track of that (experian, trans union, quick books, etc) that get this from everything from your employer's bookkeeping software to your credit applications. And they sell your data. So if they know where you live and an app knows where you live ...

aboodman 5y ago

They can tell by where you shop and where you live.