Jobs: Claims about iOS tracking are 'false'
updated 10:55 am EDT, Mon April 25, 2011
Android simultaneously guilty, says CEO
The iPhone doesn't track a person's location, but Android phones do, claims Apple CEO Steve Jobs. An email sent by a MacRumors reader asks the executive to "explain the necessity of the passive location-tracking tool" in iOS devices. "It’s kind of unnerving knowing that my exact location is being recorded at all times. Maybe you could shed some light on this for me before I switch to a Droid. They don’t track me," the reader goes on.
"Oh yes they do," reads Jobs' response. "We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false."
A problem in Jobs' statement is that iOS 4 is now known to be saving imprecise location data to a local file on iPhones and 3G iPads. The data is moreover saved on a person's computer and ported between devices via iTunes. Jobs may, however, be referring to a more active form of tracking revealed by analyst Samy Kamkar, who recently noted that Android is not only transmitting expected location data but also a hardware identifier and the location and quality of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots.
Google has denied that its phones are archiving location data without consent. "Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific user," the company says. It may however be theoretically possible for a third party to access the data and use it to identify a person
A problem in Jobs' statement is that iOS 4 is now known to be saving imprecise location data to a local file on iPhones and 3G iPads. The data is moreover saved on a person's computer and ported between devices via iTunes. Jobs may, however, be referring to a more active form of tracking revealed by analyst Samy Kamkar, who recently noted that Android is not only transmitting expected location data but also a hardware identifier and the location and quality of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots.
Google has denied that its phones are archiving location data without consent. "Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific user," the company says. It may however be theoretically possible for a third party to access the data and use it to identify a person
Read more: http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/04/25/android.simultaneously.guilty.says.ceo/#ixzz1KYQaDZlU
PlaceIQ’s Location-Aware Advertising Can Target You Block By Block
It used to be that all a marketer needed to know was your zipcode, and they could infer your income range and a whole host of other demographic data about you. But with everyone now using mobile phones that can be targeted down to exact GPS coordinates at different times of the day, areas bounded by zipcodes seem vast in comparison. Imagine if instead marketers could break up the world into 100 million different tiles, each one about the size of a city block, and infer everything from what types of people are likely to be found in that tile at any given time. That’s basically what mobile advertising data startup PlaceIQ is setting out to do.
Mobile advertising inventory still goes largely unfilled because the relevance and targeting isn’t that good. PlaceIQ sifts through tons of data about locations to give marketers a mini-zipcode-like profile of each block. The data comes from both open sources and commercial data sets, including place data, retail data, government data, event data, photo data, social data, and, crime data. This goes well beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, but the company says it doesn’t use any personally identifiable information. Rather, it is making assumptions based on the contextual cues of a person’s location and time of day.
It takes all of these various hyper-local data sources and maps it onto its 100 million map tiles. Then it normalizes the data and can guess what type of person is likely to be at that location at that time (a student, tourist, shopper, financial or tech worker, etc). It can also spit out information such as retail sales volume, events, foot traffic by time, and social media activity. And once people start responding to ads, it can fold in ad conversion dat aas well. The goal to give marketers the ability to target different mobile ads to students out drinking at night and financial employees working during the day.
Backed with $1 million in angel money from IA Ventures, Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage and hedge fund manager Jim Pallota, PlaceIQ launched late last week. It is working with partners such as Where (which was justbought by eBay), Navteq, Admeld, and ad agencies such as Havas / Mobext, Integer, and Communefx.
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