Leading OOH company WallDecaux and mobile tracking company Adsquare have just announced the creation of a platform called "OOH-Planner", to track people watching OOH ads through their mobile phone.
> This is only possible because Adsquare's "OOH-Planner" evaluates data from 43 million smartphones in realtime in the background.
Okay, the tech behind this can almost be called trivial at this point, just like data integration with whatever their existing database was, but how in the hell is that not illegal, especially if they combine data into profiles? Even if they hide it in some pseudo opt-ini legalese, I remember a lively debate here in Germany around the time tracking garbage cans were deployed in London, and that was before GDPR was introduced.
Edit: Removed rant about developers at these companies, because the tech seems to be different than proximity based sniffing. According to PDFs [0] on their website they use app data from a plethora of platforms and get anonymized phone traffic data from a company called MotionLogic, which in turn seems to get their data from Deutsche Telekom https://www.t-systems.com/de/en/solutions/digitization/solut... - good job privatization, the then government based entity now sells your movement data to ad companies.
I really wonder how "anonymized" all their data really is after integrating all of their sources. Feels like an almost laughable claim.
Not that point 10, their list of tracking stuff, wasn't long enough to worry about already but I fail to find real time geo data mentioned in here: https://www.wetter.com/datenschutz/adsb/ Might be that one of those third parties infers it via Geo-IP (let's hope so).
Right, it seems they only use tracking to display ads for their app/website.
But then I wonder why they would be listed as Adsquare partner for their proximity targeting technology? Geo-IP can be used in some cases (weather, events), but is in other cases not precise enough for real proximity targeting.
Also, strangely, all Adsquare listed proximity targeting partners are apps or companies that have direct access to their users GPS position.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadThe announcement: https://youtu.be/hoxPJRoNp34
> This is only possible because Adsquare's "OOH-Planner" evaluates data from 43 million smartphones in realtime in the background.
Okay, the tech behind this can almost be called trivial at this point, just like data integration with whatever their existing database was, but how in the hell is that not illegal, especially if they combine data into profiles? Even if they hide it in some pseudo opt-ini legalese, I remember a lively debate here in Germany around the time tracking garbage cans were deployed in London, and that was before GDPR was introduced.
Edit: Removed rant about developers at these companies, because the tech seems to be different than proximity based sniffing. According to PDFs [0] on their website they use app data from a plethora of platforms and get anonymized phone traffic data from a company called MotionLogic, which in turn seems to get their data from Deutsche Telekom https://www.t-systems.com/de/en/solutions/digitization/solut... - good job privatization, the then government based entity now sells your movement data to ad companies.
I really wonder how "anonymized" all their data really is after integrating all of their sources. Feels like an almost laughable claim.
[0] https://www.walldecaux.de/smartnet#download
So weather apps just track the real time position of their users and resell it to adsquare? I'm really dumbfounded, but this appears to be true: https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612719/the-weather-channe...
But then I wonder why they would be listed as Adsquare partner for their proximity targeting technology? Geo-IP can be used in some cases (weather, events), but is in other cases not precise enough for real proximity targeting.
Also, strangely, all Adsquare listed proximity targeting partners are apps or companies that have direct access to their users GPS position.