This just kicks the can one level down the road. Aggregator companies like PlaceIQ, Foursquare and Yelp will act as the intermediary and create more rigorous ways to detect spammy / useless location signals, and smooth out location tracking data.
Those intermediaries are the main worries, because brands or marketers may not trust every random Android app, but they will trust Yelp or Foursquare or something, and frankly given additional scale from data bartering and SDK pings that send back location from many other apps, places like Foursquare or Yelp really can provide targeting services that come close to what adtech has always promised.
To be clear, I’d consider this a bad thing, because places like Foursquare or Yelp, whatever they may say to put a PR spin on it, are quite literally preying on people who unwittingly share their location data and don’t really understand the terms, especially not when it’s some tertiary SDK traffic logs agreement causing some music app or hotel app or weather app to send them data tied to your IP address or device ID.
If those businesses can’t monetize their basic value proposition, like a app to search reviews of restaurants, it’s a signal to delete & shutdown the app... but unfortunately it’s become the reverse: a signal to abandon investment into the actual user and diversify all kinds of deceitful behind the scenes ways of getting user data and making users into the product.
Those intermediaries are the main worries, because brands or marketers may not trust every random Android app, but they will trust Yelp or Foursquare or something, and frankly given additional scale from data bartering and SDK pings that send back location from many other apps, places like Foursquare or Yelp really can provide targeting services that come close to what adtech has always promised.
To be clear, I’d consider this a bad thing, because places like Foursquare or Yelp, whatever they may say to put a PR spin on it, are quite literally preying on people who unwittingly share their location data and don’t really understand the terms, especially not when it’s some tertiary SDK traffic logs agreement causing some music app or hotel app or weather app to send them data tied to your IP address or device ID.
If those businesses can’t monetize their basic value proposition, like a app to search reviews of restaurants, it’s a signal to delete & shutdown the app... but unfortunately it’s become the reverse: a signal to abandon investment into the actual user and diversify all kinds of deceitful behind the scenes ways of getting user data and making users into the product.