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What Your Phone is Telling Wall Street (wsj.com)
Your phone knows where you shop, where you work and where you sleep. Hedge funds are very interested in such data, so they are buying it. From a report: When Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said the car maker would work around the clock to boost production of its Model 3 sedan, the number crunchers at Thasos Group decided to watch. They circled Tesla's 370 acres in Fremont, Calif., on an online map, creating a digital corral to isolate smartphone location signals that emanated from within it. Thasos, which leases databases of trillions of geographic coordinates collected by smartphone apps, set its computers to find the pings created at Tesla's factory, then shared the data with its hedge-fund clients [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], showing the overnight shift swelled 30% from June to October.
Last month, many on Wall Street were surprised when Tesla disclosed a rare quarterly profit, the result of Model 3 production that had nearly doubled in three months. Shares shot up 9.1% the next day. Thasos is at the vanguard of companies trying to help traders get ahead of stock moves like that using so-called alternative data. Such suppliers might examine mine slag heaps from outer space, analyze credit-card spending data or sort through construction permits. Thasos's specialty is spewing out of your smartphone.
Thasos gets data from about 1,000 apps, many of which need to know a phone's location to be effective, like those providing weather forecasts, driving directions or the whereabouts of the nearest ATM. Smartphone users, wittingly or not, share their location when they use such apps. Before Thasos gets the data, suppliers scrub it of personally identifiable information, Mr. Skibiski said. It is just time-stamped strings of longitude and latitude. But with more than 100 million phones providing such coordinates, Thasos says it can paint detailed pictures of the ebb and flow of people, and thus their money.
Last month, many on Wall Street were surprised when Tesla disclosed a rare quarterly profit, the result of Model 3 production that had nearly doubled in three months. Shares shot up 9.1% the next day. Thasos is at the vanguard of companies trying to help traders get ahead of stock moves like that using so-called alternative data. Such suppliers might examine mine slag heaps from outer space, analyze credit-card spending data or sort through construction permits. Thasos's specialty is spewing out of your smartphone.
Thasos gets data from about 1,000 apps, many of which need to know a phone's location to be effective, like those providing weather forecasts, driving directions or the whereabouts of the nearest ATM. Smartphone users, wittingly or not, share their location when they use such apps. Before Thasos gets the data, suppliers scrub it of personally identifiable information, Mr. Skibiski said. It is just time-stamped strings of longitude and latitude. But with more than 100 million phones providing such coordinates, Thasos says it can paint detailed pictures of the ebb and flow of people, and thus their money.
Most people wouldn't know how to do that, though.
There needs to be a OS mod that randomizes location data that apps get within 5 to 10 miles. Only feed the navigation app (if open) the correct data. 5-10 miles should be enough precision for things like weather to work perfectly, while polluting the data streams that app provides sell to third parties.
The smarter nations don't allow their security cleared workers to bring consumer hardware in with them.
:)
What can't be seen from space can now be tracked per worker per shift from the ground.
Who works in an office, who works on the mil/gov production line.
The skilled workers that get the mil production line working after it stops.
What areas of a mil production line still have the most visits by experts.
Wonder what a nations top police, city government officials, mil contractors and mil do all day? Map it out and find out
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We are not most people.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Most people know how to click "No" when the app asks for permissions. Most people just don't care.
The FedEX guy picking up the packages from our company in 1990s said he noted down the number of packages being shipped on the quarter ending evening. He always bought the stock if it showed significant jump over the previous quarter.
For all that talk about these techniques, the day before Tesla announced its third quarter results, real old fashioned bean counting led a very notable short (named Left, some company called Citron) to reverse course and announce publicly he was no longer shorting Tesla. S3 partners calculated that announcement made 1 billion loss for the shorts.
So, yes, novel methods are being discovered. But it is rounding error compared to old fashioned standard research.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Very funny to read about some photo showing one car with hood open, and these shorts speculating, "they are fixing something in the engine". (The frunk is empty, it is a small storage compartment and you open the hood to put the car in tow mode to load it on a carrier. )
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So it's made up, right? Like "alternative facts" are.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
We are not most people.
But we still are too dumb to RTFS.
They are NOT using location data from apps. They are just counting cell phone transmissions.
They are just trying to estimate the aggregate number of people in the factory, to see if they are really working late to ship product.
Similar tactics have been used in the past. For instance, when satellite images first went on-line, hedge funds developed software to count cars in mall parking lots. This put them weeks ahead of other investors that were waiting for the Fed to release data based on retail surveys.
Another tactic is to photograph cargo ships entering and leaving port. If they sit high in the water, that means many of the containers are going back empty, and the trade deficit is more likely to widen, which means a weaker dollar.
Facebook apps should already be uninstalled or disabled.
One I remember being famous back in the day was Iomega had released the Zip Drive, and online communities tracked the number of cars in the parking lot on the weekend.
Certain companies do things to obscure their energy use to try to keep that from leaking information. It gets complicated...
Tesla announces even more production, buys thousands of flip phones and randomly turns them on and off inside the factory all day long.
"But we still are too dumb to RTFS."
We're not dumb - the fucking story is paywalled. And unfortunately search result quality on Big Brother Google has for some time been downgraded to show only semi-official fake news sources. So a quick search turned up no liberated copy of the article.
Anyways, the both summary says they are buying databases of surveillance data from smartphone malware/apps. "Thasos gets data from about 1,000 apps, many of which need to know a phone's location to be effective".
Certainly sounds plausible. Why else would malware companies give away "free" shovelware apps, if they weren't planning to spy on and otherwise abuse their users?
I don't know about you but as far as I'm concerned, these Thanos guys can eat shit.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
That's not a problem with the app, and changing the app won't make "most people" any less stupid and gullible.
Big data suppliers consistently ignore their published policies and often break the law and nothing serious happens to them. Just naming Facebook and Twitter proves the point.
If you take this story at face value you deserve to be hoodwinked and manipulated. We live in the world of 1984 except the surveillance state combines the public and private sectors. Facebook and the NSA are part of a seamless whole.
Why is Snark Required?
Next up: Driving around the area with a carfull of smartphones to skew the data.
No sig today...
No, Tesla does not build to order.
Sure they do. They also do some amount of Build To Stock. Doing one does not preclude doing the other, even with the same product going down the same assembly line. My company does some similar things. We mostly BTO but when we have good reason to suspect a customer will order more of a specific product we often will BTS some extras units so we can save money on setup costs and buy materials in bulk. We are taking a calculated risk by doing so but it usually works out in our favor. Tesla if they are smart is doing the same thing. If they have a model configuration that is popular they can save some money by building a few extras of that model when they are going down the line.
Could this just be clever "parallel construction" to cover insider trading? Buy some satellite data or phone location data and use it to prove what you already know.