[curare]

At a previous employer we used the data referenced in the question. We bought the "anonymised" telecom data from one of the big providers in the USA. We would then analyse that data to figure out where the phone spent 6-8 hours during the night to determine where the phone owner lived. Then we'd pull the USA consensus data(free!) so the system would know what demographic the user probably belongs to. We got a surprising amount of data from the consensus, we had things like ethnicity, income, age.

Then we'd loaded all this in google maps and let users of the app figure out what demographics frequent particular locations on the map. For example a use-case of this would be a coffee company figuring out where to open a new coffee shop.

[overkalix]

Census

[pc86]

Is there anything even remotely unethical about this?

Compiling publicly available data with purchased/proprietary data is basically the foundation of competitive/market research, isn't it?

[curare]

In my opinion the sale of phone location data is already unethical on it’s own.

The location data was pretty accurate too in suburban areas. And the provider in question was not very good at anonymising it either. On multiple occasions we could track individuals over a longer period of time. Which would shut down the entire project until it was fixed.

So the company did the right thing whenever the data was compromised. Probably because they were publicly traded and had a good name. I doubt scrappy startups would do the same.

[forgottenpass]

Whether something is the catercorner of a business model has no bearing on if it is ethical or not.

[pc86]

Market research is not unethical unless you think capitalism is unethical at its roots. And if you do I'm curious why you're spending time on a venture capital forum.

And catercorner means diagonal to, not sure what word you're trying to use here.

[forgottenpass]

I am not saying market research is unethical (also not not saying that). I was just pointing out what looks like a total non-sequitur.

It was supposed to be "cornerstone" not "catercorner" but I guess autocorrect?