[typeiierror]

I work peripherally in this industry, so I can provide more context to the data used here; based on the press release[i], Clear Channel is using three different types of data for this:

1) AT&T cell tower data. All major US carriers collect aggregate movement data, and some have productized it (check out Grandata and Streetlight Data if you're interested). They're likely providing something like a persons count by daypart to Clear Channel at some geography, likely census block group. AT&T likely provides course demographics as well (either by purchasing them from a data broker like Experian or Epsilon) or by looking up the aggregate demo characteristics reported by the US Census for the block group of the subscribers household. As an aside, current gen (4G) cell tower data isn't very precise - maybe 100m accuracy or worse.

2) Placed opt in GPS panel data. There are many market research companies that pay consumer run location tracking apps (mFour and Instantly are other examples). Placed is probably the biggest (~1mm panelists).

3) PlaceIQ mobile ad server GPS data. PlaceIQ, xAd, Factual, Verve, Ninth Decimal...all of these companies read the lat / long coordinates provided by mobile SSPs in mobile RTB bid stream to create location segment profiles associated with your phone's Ad ID. The data isn't very accurate (mobile ad fraud is a problem...an app change the GPS coord from rural Kansas to downtown Manhattan to juice their CPM in an auction; also, most of the GPS used for buying mobile inventory is via "LastKnownLocation" apis which are notoriously inaccurate). These guys generally use their data to group your Ad ID into a segment (if they see you at a Wendy's, they'll sell your Ad ID to mobile RTB bidders as a "Frequent Wendy's eater"). Clear Channel is probably using this to see if exposure to a billboard caused you to make a purchase that they can attribute to your Ad ID (say via the advertisers CRM database), or to augment the demo data from AT&T with demo segments they can buy from mobile data exchanges.

[i]: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160229005959/en/Clea...

[hackuser]

> There are many market research companies that pay consumer run location tracking apps

Why do they pay consumers when so many apps collect that data for free?

[typeiierror]

A couple of reasons - data quality and usage restrictions are the top. Here's an example - say I'm Big Box Retailer & Co and I want to measure how many people who visit my store also visited my competitor, Small Box Retailer Inc. Where can I go to buy that data?

-Facebook or Google don't sell their raw user data. They can tell me how effective the ads I placed on their sites were at driving visits or sales by matching my customer's email & phone numbers to their users (see [1] and [2]), but they won't give me data on my competitor, and the data will always be aggregated. So on to the next idea..

-Mobile ad server data aggregators might sell me their raw data, but the quality isn't great. Sure, they track 100m+ devices...but how many times do they see each of those devices a day? For most devices it's 10 times or less, so you're going to have a big problem with false negatives (people who visited Big Box Retailer and Small Box Retailer, but due to the sparsity of the data I miss one of those visits). On to the next...

-Foursquare is newly in the data business, but despite having a big audience (50m MAU), only ~1.3m users have opted in for continuous measurement ([3]). On top of that, Foursquare's audience is pretty skewed - if Big Box Retailer's customers are older, I'm going to have trouble finding them in Foursquare's data set, which means the effective size of their 1.3m 'panel' is really something like 200k-500k. On top of that, I can't survey them to verify they actually visited Small Box Retailer instead of the McDonalds next store, since the GPS data Foursquare pulls is LastKnown instead of exact.

-...so if the only data I can buy on the open market is skewed, not really that big (not to mention collected under potentially dubious privacy policies), whats my alternative? Thats the need these panels are filling.

As an aside, if you're curious what apps on your phone are collecting your location data, you can use a self-hosted MITM server w/ SSL decryption to sniff your own traffic. Here's own for Android: https://code.google.com/archive/p/sandrop/

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-touts-mobile-ad-technolog... [2] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebook-gives-retaile... [3] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/22/attribution-by-foursquare/

[retbull]

In addition to this people do things to their phones that make data useless quite often. They turn off their gps, root the phone and change the clock so they can cheat at games, use location spoofing apps so they can pretend to be somewhere else on tinder. Then on top of that it can be hard to tell where people are even with gps on because being in a building screws it up. There are several solutions to that problem but nothing is perfect.