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Comment by throwawaymath | Hacker News Reader

Pinsight is a big one.

But there are too many to name. In 2018, you should assume that any free service (Unroll.me), web/mobile SDK (Slice), email client (Airmail), personal finance tracker (Mint), integration API (Plaid), geolocator (Foursquare), etc is monetized by selling your data en masse for market research.

It's not just location data. Dig into the TOS of free services you use. It's your receipts, your transactions, your subscriptions...all are "anonymized" to varying degrees of success. Even Meraki, the network router/switch company, sells location data.[1]

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1. https://meraki.cisco.com/technologies/location-analytics

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Link to pinsight: https://pinsightmedia.com

> Ever wonder what your consumer thinks minute-by-minute? Pinsight’s ID Suite gets behind the lock screen to understand the mindset of your best customer. Leveraging 24/7 insights from the mobile device, we uncover new audiences and discover new market opportunities so you can engage with consumers in ways that matter.

“Gets behind the lock screen”

Jeez that is some brazen marketing.

I hear "groping inside the knickers".

It's blatant and normalized.

Assuming you’re talking about Airmail, the iOS and Mac mail client[1] (which is not a free app), do you have any reference to back up this claim? Their privacy statement states:

> Airmail does not share your information with any third parties. We are not in the business of selling your data. However, we may disclose information if we determine that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to comply with the law.

They also state that they do not send information to their servers unless you enable push notifications, store data only for this purpose, and delete the data when you disable this setting.

[1] http://airmailapp.com

Yes I think you're right, sorry. I'm thinking more of the email clients like Edison [1] and Astro[2]. It gets hard to keep all of these apps straight :)

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1. https://trends.edison.tech and https://mail.edison.tech

2. https://www.helloastro.com/privacy/

Hasn't Foursquare been doing this and nothing but this for ten years now?

Foursquare is selling business services based on the data they collect, not the data itself (as far as I know).

They sell direct location analytics: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290543

This is mostly a distinction without a difference, because for firms that do this, one of those "business services" is providing a thin layer of analysis over the underlying data.

What I'm saying is they don't sell the raw location data they've collected. There is a huge difference between derived analytics and the raw point-by-point device-linked location data. It's a reduction of multiple terabytes of data down to a few kilobytes of identity-obfuscating information. I am not affiliated with Foursquare but I appreciate the direction of their pivot.

Honestly, since my line of work is similar (tangential) to what they do, my opinions are probably quite different from the moral majority who might read about this kind of issue without understanding the range of applications. I'm not sure what the solution is but I think there is a regulatory solution that preserves both consumer privacy and the extraction of economy-benefiting value. And I do think something needs to be done to protect privacy, even if it means negative impacts to the commercial space I am in.

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