Location aggregation companies, like Yelp and Foursquare, actually do have large enough scale in terms of always-on location trail data to legitimately attempt this type of targeting. Combined with the fact that you’re giving them free data about your visits to places, your tastes, your likely income level based on where you shop, your home location, and from this they could reasonably predict your gender and put you into all sorts of specific advertiser buckets, it’s frankly perfectly reasonable to claim you could use it for ad targeting or measuring ad campaigns, even with a low match rate against the advertiser’s actual list of customers (under 1% surely).
To boot, Foursquare at least, and probably Yelp too, does data swapping and SDK agreements, like some thing recently announced with Accuweather (gross) and with Hilton Hotels.
I think people sincerely fail to imagine the real scope of this type of egregious trust violation and surveillance business model.
You can dress it up with whatever language you want about providing value to the user that makes them agreeable to the data collection terms, but I’m sure half of Foursquare users or Yelp users don’t actually know if they have the background location tracking disabled or not, or what other innocuous-seeming apps are silently feeding location pings to build a Foursquare data history about you to make you targetable for ads.
Frankly, I’d personally advise anyone to absolutely delete these apps or anything like them, and essentially vote with your wallet / vote by boycott and just refuse any apps that rely on this kind of business model.
To boot, Foursquare at least, and probably Yelp too, does data swapping and SDK agreements, like some thing recently announced with Accuweather (gross) and with Hilton Hotels.
I think people sincerely fail to imagine the real scope of this type of egregious trust violation and surveillance business model.
You can dress it up with whatever language you want about providing value to the user that makes them agreeable to the data collection terms, but I’m sure half of Foursquare users or Yelp users don’t actually know if they have the background location tracking disabled or not, or what other innocuous-seeming apps are silently feeding location pings to build a Foursquare data history about you to make you targetable for ads.
Frankly, I’d personally advise anyone to absolutely delete these apps or anything like them, and essentially vote with your wallet / vote by boycott and just refuse any apps that rely on this kind of business model.
[0]: https://www.adweek.com/digital/foursquare-will-fuel-accuweat...