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It is mainly used by hedge funds. I have heard it is used by some marketing firms, I have heard that some corporates use it for data on their own properties/co
by hogFeast 5y ago
It is mainly used by hedge funds.
I have heard it is used by some marketing firms, I have heard that some corporates use it for data on their own properties/competitors (the former may not be obvious, but some malls may do this to check on tenants, malls also usually have their own tracking stuff on site too btw) but the main user are hedge funds.
Not all of this data is useful by itself but it is useful once you integrate it with everything else (lots of firms have tried to use this data on it's own, and then complained it "doesn't work" when they employ no-one who actually understands the restaurant business, for example).
Also, I will say too...99% of this data is coming from free apps whose only purpose is to harvest data from the unwitting. I don't understand fully how this is possible because, presumably, it should be quite obvious to App Stores that a flashlight app does not need to know your location...but it keeps happening. Some of the big data aggregators are actually pretty creepy, I have seen some companies retailing personalised data on every person in the US, I don't think anyone knows where it is all coming from apart from them (I also wouldn't discount hacking tbh, there is so much money in this that I think they have to be doing it).
Imo, all this shit should be blocked. Even within hedge funds, you are seeing funds that are using this data, no-one knows where it comes from, how it was collected, and they making piles of money from it but no-one else can access it...they just call up a firm, tell them they will pay $50m/year if you don't sell this to anyone else, it is all very opaque.
- jrochkind1 5y agoWhat do hedge funds do with location data?
- hogFeast 5y agoFootfall for retail, property, also could be useful with commodities. But they have other data: they have your bills, emails, app usage data...again, not sure how legal it is or whether some of this isn't hacked data (App Annie is a, presumably, legal source...but there are far more).
- bunabhucan 5y agoSpeculation but they could geofence individual home addresses and stores and generate a list of customers/employees, use the phone locations at 3am to get home addresses and the location during business hours to predict whether (say) Walmart traffic was up or down vs Target. They could also figure out who works at Walmart/Target and track shift hours, headcount etc. and predict earnings.
- klabb3 5y agohttps://www.unacast.com/post/hedge-fund-location-data https://www.unacast.com/post/hedge-fund-location-data > Modeling consumer behavior and forecasting future financial performance based on foot traffic and POI data; > Evaluating and managing real estate asset portfolios based on migration patterns; > Conducting trade area analysis for new investment opportunities; > Leveraging property-level insights to build more specific insurance risk assessments; and > Assessing sector and competitor performance. Note that this is the words of the data broker itself. This one in particular doesn't appear to sell individual data, but rather aggregates by age/county/census group/income etc. It appears as most of their source data is mobile/app based. I'd not be surprised if fraud is common among data miners and brokers - it'd be easy to inflate numbers in order to make more $. Feeding the data miners with fake data would probably be relatively easy to pull off - say you just bought a house in a remote area and you want some new shops to open and the price of your house to go up..