[kuhhk]

> they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake. No one has stopped to think about where that data has come from and why a publisher would choose to sell it all to a vendor who is going to build a business on top of their data. What’s actually happening is these ad tech vendors are trying to pad out the limited data they already own with other data sets from competitive vendors or other unknown sources.

Sounds more like textbook fraud than a Ponzi scheme (though, honestly I did not read the whole article).

[PLenz]

Not really fraud, phones have different levels of horizontal accuracy based off of privacy settings, GPS & cell signal strength, battery life, CPU load and that's before you get to the obfuscation that exchanges do. At Dstillery we built a geodata classifier to tell us what was and what wasn't good data. We throw out 60% to 75% a day as not useful for learning anything from. But we can be picky since we combine web and location data we aren't beholden to needing the unreasonable amounts of location data you need working with just location data. Location should be holistic part of the data, not the be-all, end-all.

[PLenz]

It should also be noted that we have anti fraud tech baked into our system that fires before our geodata stuff runs. Fraud gets cleared out for being fraud not for being bad location data.