To clarify for anyone wondering, 404 Media and WIRED have a partnership so WIRED will occasionally publish their content and they hope to collaborate together on articles (although I'm not sure if this was one of them)
Mobile devices are pretty good at protecting location privacy these days: Android at least puts up a fuss if something wants location data. Are they also tracking via IP geolocation and ad surveillance?
Proximity lets you infer lots of things.
If you have location over time, you can learn a lot about where a person spends their time which lets you infer what they like to do which advertisers will pay a premium for.
Related:
Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651115 - Jan 2025
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I thought that too, but it looks like 404media published the same article on two different sites.
To clarify for anyone wondering, 404 Media and WIRED have a partnership so WIRED will occasionally publish their content and they hope to collaborate together on articles (although I'm not sure if this was one of them)
Full list of 12k apps:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ukgd0gIWd9gpV6bOx2pc...
It seems about 2.7k are iOS apps.
Another article on this story without a paywall: https://www.wired.com/story/gravy-location-data-app-leak-rtb...
Mobile devices are pretty good at protecting location privacy these days: Android at least puts up a fuss if something wants location data. Are they also tracking via IP geolocation and ad surveillance?
Why is location so valuable?
Proximity lets you infer lots of things. If you have location over time, you can learn a lot about where a person spends their time which lets you infer what they like to do which advertisers will pay a premium for.
Anyone have any insight into how they translate on scale location data to usable marketing data like you describe?
paywall