Thursday, March 08, 2018

Your Location Data is Being Sold - Often Without Your Knowledge

Marketers spent $16 billion on location-targeted ads in 2017, which represents 40% of all mobile advertising spending. This dollar amount is expected to double by 2021, highlighting the importance marketers place on this technology and the ability to track customer behavior in order to create more valuable customer segments.

As this technology improves and more dollars are funded to its advancement, implications for mobile marketing and personal privacy are significant. The potential for a data breach to expose an individual's personal information like his/her home or work addresses, hang out spots and the like is real. A hacker could gain highly valuable pieces of information and impose meaningful damage. It's possible that if such a breach were to occur at scale, that advertising in this way could be drastically reigned in. Security and regulation of this technology should be much more significant than it is today in order to avoid such an event.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-location-data-is-being-soldoften-without-your-knowledge-1520168400

No comments: