Privacy policies for geolocation data are changing....what will be the impact?

How's your week going? Spring has arrived here on the East Coast, and pandemic-era restrictions are gradually lifting, so we're excited for the coming months. That being said, if you're using geolocation for ad-targeting, you may be sweating a bit more than you usually do this time of year. Which brings us to the primary theme of this week's Data Feed - Geolocation Data.

What is geolocation data? 
It is a signal of a person’s location at a certain point in time. This signal can come from tracing a landline phone (old school), an IP address, or a mobile phone’s GPS (the focus of this week's Data Feed).

What is it useful for?
Geolocation data from mobile phones is incredibly rich. Consider two use-cases: 

• Audience-based targeting: As a user passes through certain locations, applications on the phone can deploy targeted advertising based on: usage of other apps on the phone, events occurring in a given location, and detection of a near-by location (i.e., a gym asking if you want to check-in).

• Are people returning to McDonalds at pre-pandemic levels in Austin, TX? (btw, we’ll be covering this in tomorrow's webinar (RSVP)): Geolocation data aggregators (data landscape) have the ability to identify the duration of mobile phone signals at points-of-interest (retail shops, businesses, parks, etc.). Based on this, it’s possible to identify the number of daily visitors to the franchise and monitor this over time.

We’ve identified a few more use-cases here that specifically apply to commercial insurance and lending.

What’s changing?
The key issue with mobile geolocation data is user consent. If you’ve ever installed an app on your phone (iOS or Android) - you’re providing consent for location-based tracking (and tracking across other apps on the phone), unless you’ve specifically opted-out. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were already concerns about user consent and privacy, but they were put on hold because the data proved quite useful for social distance metrics and contact tracing. While the pandemic continues to rage in certain countries, Apple believes it’s time to put the user first again, by asking users to opt-in to tracking (both within app and across app activity).

What will be the impact?
The immediate disruption of these changes will be significant (Forbes provides an in-depth analysis). For audience-based targeting (a $400BN market), ad effectiveness will decline significantly. For visit-based tracking, the iOS portion of mobile panels may decline by a minimum of 40% initially. But there is a silver lining - first, Android users are currently unaffected and second, mobile data aggregators have historically been quite savvy at rebalancing and normalizing their panels. To learn more about this topic, tune into our joint webinar with Unacast tomorrow!

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Have a great rest of the week!


Prashant Reddy