No, it's more about understanding consumer sentiment about a product category or company based on mining consumer information in aggregate. For example, a hedge fund could know how many people went inside a Wal-Mart over the last few months based on cellular location data. If there's an unfavorable downturn in store traffic, the hedge fund can shift its investments based on information that Wal-Mart won't report for another few months.
> Tracking elected officials should reveal who influences whom, and who's bribing whom. It may be possible to detect bribery to the level of establishing probable cause for an investigation in that way.
The way political fundraising is done in the US, most bribes look like legitimate campaign finance money. In some states, it's even legal for a candidate to simply redirect whatever is in his campaign fund directly into his own bank account after the election. And even in states where that is illegal, 501(c)4 / SuperPACs allow politicians to do whatever they want with the money with no oversight.
With laws like that, why even bother to investigate bribery?
>> Are they tracking the CEOs of companies in which they invest, or what?
> No ...
How could you know that? I doubt anyone would reveal it, and I don't see why they wouldn't - for the unscrupulous (there are plenty of them), it could be very valuable. Remember the story about Uber tracking journalists, for example.
They would track CEOs, if only they could. I'm guessing that even in the US, mobile networks only share aggregate or anonymized data about customer location, and don't allow for spying on specific individuals.
If you want to track CEOs, I'm guessing it would be much easier to track their private jets or the license plates of company cars.
they MAY only share aggregate but what's stopping, for example, VZW using the data to their own means? competitors use their towers, potential acquisitions, market/political threats or other interesting entities. Laws and morals? Hahaha!
Most telecoms won't do this because the potential reward simply isn't worth the liability they would have for insider trading (if they get caught spying on corporate execs, then the SEC will assume they spy on every corporate exec). In fact, most big telecoms have a secret "VIP" program that flags accounts of especially wealthy, influential or famous people and restricts access to them unless you're on the "VIP" customer service team.
I'm sure hedge funds track CEOs, but they're not using data from Verizon to do it.
They calculate risk:reward and do whatever nets the most profitable return. Fines and fees are only anathema when the costs exceed the gains gotten from illicit behavior. Otherwise, paying fines without admitting guilt is the corporate way.
There are better ways to track CEOs than through mass data collection -- targeted data collection (aka hiring a private investigator) works much better. Though most CEOs of big companies have security details that keep the wolves at bay.
Yeah, I was using that as an example -- but I'm sure you can think of other things you could measure using bulk cell phone data that would give you insight into the future financial performance of a company -- often before the company itself knows.
aren't the companies employing wireless trackers in store? even small shops can get some useful tracking data from "custom" OpenWRT based firmwares on consumer-level wifi/router devices.
>In some states, it's even legal for a candidate to simply redirect whatever is in his campaign fund directly into his own bank account after the election
> Tracking elected officials should reveal who influences whom, and who's bribing whom. It may be possible to detect bribery to the level of establishing probable cause for an investigation in that way.
The way political fundraising is done in the US, most bribes look like legitimate campaign finance money. In some states, it's even legal for a candidate to simply redirect whatever is in his campaign fund directly into his own bank account after the election. And even in states where that is illegal, 501(c)4 / SuperPACs allow politicians to do whatever they want with the money with no oversight.
With laws like that, why even bother to investigate bribery?