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This is a new multi-billion dollar industry: phone location data is bought and sold

As thenextweb writes, in recent years, a huge but little-known industry has emerged that collects and sells location data for mobile devices.

Companies you’ve probably never heard of offer access to your smartphone’s location history. The $ 12 billion location data industry has a multitude of players — collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms — all bragging about the scale and accuracy of the data they collect.

thenextweb

The Markup has identified 47 companies that collect or trade cell phone location data. Six companies said they had more than a billion devices in their data, and at least four said their data was the “most accurate” in the industry.

This is a new multi-billion dollar industry: phone location data is bought and sold

For example, geolocation firm Near calls itself “the world’s largest aggregator of real-world human behavior data,” with data representing “1.6 billion people in 44 countries.” Mobilewalla offers 5 years of data that covers over 40 countries and nearly 2 billion mobile devices. X-Mode claims its data covers “25% + US adults per month.”

Notably, Oracle has a partner that openly advertises data on millions of people in the United States. This includes demographic information such as personal activities and life preferences. Meanwhile, Oracle, Epsilon and others are also explicitly promoting data exchange platforms to thousands of companies.

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