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Carriers Selling Your Data: a $24 Billion Business (adage.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the maybe-the-NSA-should-pretend-to-be-a-marketer dept.

An anonymous reader writes: It goes without saying that cellphone carriers have access to tons of data about their subscribers. They have data about who you call, what sites you visit, and even where you're located. Now: "Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP to manage and sell data." The article describes some of the ways this data is used by marketers: "The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations." Analysts estimate this fledgling industry to be worth about $24 billion to the carriers, and they project huge growth over the next several years. The carriers are trying to keep it a tightly held secret after seeing the backlash from the public in response to government snooping, which involves much less private data.

3 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How is this under the radar? by AHuxley · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Senate Rejects All CISA Amendments Designed To Protect Privacy, Reiterating That It's A Surveillance Bill" (Oct 27th 2015 )
    https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
    All your data is for sale and no looking or asking about what the US is buy or using it for :)

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  2. Example employer buys tracks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Imagine I'm an employer and I buy the local set of phone location tracks, that are 'anonymous'.

    I have my employees home addresses, a GIS database gives me the corresponding GPS coordinates, (data point1), I know the factory GPS coordinates (data point 2), so I can then filter that data using those two points to determine what 'anonymous' data corresponds to each of my employees.

    Now I have effective tracking of my employees, and I can link in their search history, their friends, any hospitals, any bad habits... all can be de-anonymized easily.

    Even if I didn't have their home address, they check in each data at the factory, so I have a time and location for many number of days, so I have many data points, to de-anonymize any data you give me.

    There simply is no such thing as anonymous data. It's not meta data, its data.

  3. Re:$24 billion dollars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    You appear to be confused. This is capitalism. The aim of capitalism is to maximize profits, not to minimize consumer cost.