Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Wireless Carriers are Making Money from Your Movements
April 22, 2014
In yet another way to make money, Verizon has led the way in monetizing our movements. A recent article from the MIT Technology Review sheds new light on what is happening.
Though wireless carriers have a huge amount of data about activities, they have historically used it only for internal planning and advertising. But the relentless pressure to generate more revenue has caused a number of mobile carriers to mine, package and repurpose their data to create statistics about how people move. It could prove useful to make smarter road networks and help officials track the spread of diseases. But it also presents new privacy threats.
Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. carrier with more than 98 million retail customers, changed its privacy policy in 2011 so that it could share anonymous and aggregated subscriber data with outside parties. That made possible the launch of its Precision Market Insights division last October.
The program, still young, is creating a natural extension of what already happens online, with websites tracking clicks and getting a detailed breakdown of where visitors come from and what they are interested in. Verizon is working to sell demographics about the people who, for example, attend an event, how they got there or the kinds of apps they use once they arrive. The concerns about making such data available are not that individual data points will leak out or contain compromising information but that they might be cross-referenced with other data sources to reveal unintended details about individuals or specific groups.
That should give you pause.
AirSage, an Atlanta, Georgia, company founded in 2000, has negotiated exclusive rights to put its hardware inside the firewalls of two of the top three U.S. wireless carriers and collect, anonymize, encrypt and analyze cellular tower signaling data in real time. Since AirSage solidified the second of these major partnerships about a year ago (it won’t specify which specific carriers it works with), it has been processing 15 billion locations a day and can account for the movement of about a third of the U.S. population in some places to within less than 100 meters, says marketing vice president Andrea Moe.
Right now, it is using the data mostly to help transportation planners, but that could change.
One customer of AirSage is a relatively small San Francisco startup, Streetlight Data.
Streetlight buys both cellular network and GPS navigation data that can be mined for market research. Streetlight’s software, with interactive, color-coded maps of neighborhoods and roads, offers very practical information. It can be tied to the demographics of people who work nearby, commute on a particular highway, or are just visiting, rather than just supplying information about who lives in the area. Great information for retailers wanting to market to those who drive nearby roads.
Companies thus far are sensitive to privacy concerns, wrestling with the challenge of conveying what “anonymous” and “aggregated” data means to people who are increasingly aware that they are carrying around a tracker in their pocket. (Verizon Wireless does allow its customers to opt out of the program). While I appreciate the precautions many companies take, will they continue to take those precautions when the demand to increase revenues ramps up?
Some will race to become the platform that provides the best mobile ads and deals. Verizon, for example, now has an initiative within its Precision Market Insights program that allows customers to opt in to (rather than opt out of) giving Verizon permission to share more information about who and where they are, including Web browsing and app usage data. In return, they might receive deals and offers on their phone from marketers who want to reach them.
I fret that the opt-in part of this, as well as the careful "anonymous" element will disappear over time.
Hat tip to Dave Ries.
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