I worked in ad-tech for a year before I left the tech industry as a whole. I've also done a fair bit of investigative journalism.

Let me share a thing:

Factual, a company that specializes in hyperlocal geofencing, uses geofencing much smaller than the self-regulation that their industry allows in their own rules. I learned this after a coworker quit because our company was allowing ad targeting to people using these smaller geofences. The whole company had an all-hands about it where the CEO of the company told everyone that we were not going to stop using Factual nor the smaller-than-allowed geofences because we, ourselves, were not the ones to produce those geofences. We were just a man in the middle helping to build a system to track people at high resolution.

Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.

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gruez 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.

I don't see anything contradictory between your comment and the OP. Having an amoral CEO who condones breaking geotargeting self-regulation doesn't contradict OP's claim that it's hard to tie geotargeting data in bidstreams back to a particular person.

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majormajor 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Only one person/company has to solve any given hard problem before they can sell it to interested parties. Who might lose it in a data leak, or package it up and re-sell it, etc, etc.

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chaps 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, hard. But, um, lots of things are hard.

For example, it was very hard for me to identify myself in an anonymized public dataset of vehicle trips, but I did. It was also hard to FOIA for the documents showing them writing SQL to spot my trip.. but I did.

Hard doesn't mean impossible.

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vvanpo 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It sounds like there is a story here, have you written about this somewhere?

	▲	chaps 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There definitely is and I've definitely pitched it to places. The Intercept had interest but told me that they wanted me to build the story out more to be less focused on Chicago. I understand where they were coming from (and the others who said the same thing) but it wasn't possible for me to continue doing freelance work, so no stories ended up being published about it at all.

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arghwhat 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

First thing would be that a small geofence (i.e., a narrow church on available data) is entirely orthogonal to having high precision, high quality location data available.

I won't claim with certainty that this is the case, but it seems likely that Factual was overselling their capabilities. That, or they relied specifically on having users grant high precision location data access and had nothing otherwise.

Apps that already need location data are probably the most likely sources of collecting such data - food apps, dating apps, chat apps you have sent your location in, ...

	▲	chaps 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"Apps that already need location data are probably the most likely sources of collecting such data" Yes, and many companies have access to both feeds.....