How satellite data startups like Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow track businesses, illegal mining, oil tankers, and more for clients like hedge funds and banks
add to this cameras and drones that will soon be everywhere and have an Orwellian nightmare. Especially if Facebook gets hold of this @nytimes : With 2,200 observation satellites going into orbit in the next decade, start-ups are trying to use them to churn out financially useful information that could help companies track their rivals http://www.nytimes.com/... Cristin Goodwin / @cristingoodwin : And when spying goes consumer, what do we do then? The fidelity of the data and ability to track cars at people's homes or their patterns for commercial use is here. http://twitter.com/... @fryan : Clever. After Guangdong province stopped publishing its monthly report on the health of its local factories, a US startup created its own reports using info from satellite images. http://www.nytimes.com/... Roger McNamee / @moonalice : The era of massively invasive, behavior modifying technology has begun. We are not prepared. Fortunately, journalists are giving us a chance to understand the world. If we act now, perhaps we will have a voice in how new technology gets used. http://www.nytimes.com/... Gregory Bufithis / @gregbufithis : 1/2 This is EXACTLY what we discussed @FIC_fr #FIC2019 last week. And it will also upend the #GDPR RT @azeem > Azeem's comment is spot on: The explosion in low-cost satellites is changing the game of business intelligence. Earth's orbit .. http://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : High-altitude surveillance was once the domain of global superpowers. Now, a growing number of start-ups are turning it into a business, aiming to sell insights gleaned from cameras and other sensors installed on “cube satellites” http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Times' profile of Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow arrives a year after National Geographic's deep look at how visual surveillance technology has evolved, extending that arc from street-level cameras to orbit: roughly 2,200 observation satellites are planned over the next decade, and startups are turning their output into sellable market intelligence.
The proof point is concrete — when Guangdong province stopped publishing official factory reports, a US startup built its own factory health reports from satellite images. That is the product category in miniature: independent reads on economic activity sold to hedge funds and banks.
First-order effects
- Hedge funds and banks gain an information channel outside official disclosures — tracking rival businesses, illegal mining, and oil tanker movements from imagery rather than filings.
- Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow's economics improve as the planned satellite buildout makes imagery cheaper and more frequent, widening what they can monitor per client dollar.
Second-order effects
- Companies now observable from orbit lose informational asymmetry: parking-lot counts and shipping movements become tradable signals that can front-run official numbers, pressuring how firms time and frame disclosures.
- Constellation operators like SpaceX, OneWeb, and Amazon keep expanding raw image supply, so competition among analytics startups shifts from access to interpretation — who best converts pixels into tradeable conclusions.
Third-order effects
- Cristin Goodwin's flagged endpoint — tracking cars at people's homes for commercial use — pulls satellite analytics into the same civil-liberties fight VICE documented around high-resolution satellites, supercomputers, and AI networks threatening civil liberties.
- If commercial geospatial intelligence keeps maturing, expect the efforts by 50+ countries to control digital data to extend toward Earth-observation data, forcing these startups to navigate a patchwork of privacy and sovereignty regimes.
The trend: Commercial Earth observation is becoming financialized alternative data, with privacy rules and data-sovereignty regimes trailing the rapidly growing imagery supply.