A look at the $12B location data industry, including how collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces monetize user data
A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people's movements — Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. Tweets: @jonkeegan , @seanodiggity , @darakerr , @torproject , @harpermitchell , @brendannyhan , @dangillmor , @juliaangwin , @juliaangwin , @juliaangwin , @juliaangwin , @juliaangwin , and @alfredwkng Tweets: Jon Keegan / @jonkeegan : NEW @alfredwkng and I shine a light on the murky location data industry. We found a multi-billion-dollar market fueled by the apps you grant location permissions to. Meet the collectors, buyers, sellers and aggregators who make up the pipeline. https://themarkup.org/... https://twitter.com/... Sean O'Brien / @seanodiggity : Great work at @themarkup that adds more detail and context to the ever-evolving location #surveillance industry. In January, I investigated some of the same trackers with @U039b and we will improve our repository with this new info for @PrivacyLabISP: https://github.com/... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Dara Kerr / @darakerr : Yikes. A $12 billion industry that's barely regulated. “Once a person's location data has been collected from an app and it has entered the location data marketplace, it can be sold over and over again” https://twitter.com/... @torproject : A shadowy web of invasive, location-harvesting companies are buying and selling our data with very little oversight. Taking back our privacy is an active process. One step is to use Tor Browser, with built-in protections against trackers & fingerprinting. https://themarkup.org/... @harpermitchell : Today I learned AWS has a “data marketplace” to “make it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.” https://twitter.com/... Brendan Nyhan / @brendannyhan : The vaccines aren't tracking you, but your phone is https://twitter.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : A reminder that your life is for sale — to stalkers, governments (to get around little things like the 4th Amendment), marketers of all kinds, and pretty much anyone else. None of this is transparent to you, of course. If Congress didn't approve of this, it would ban it. https://twitter.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : The companies told us that consumers know their location data is being shared but wouldn't say which apps share data with them. “The opt-in rates clearly confirm that the users are fully aware of what is happening” said a spokesperson for Cuebiq. https://twitter.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : You've most likely never heard of these companies but they are in the business of tracking you. “The World's Largest Dataset of People's Behavior in the Real-World,” claims one company, Near Co. Browse our dataset: https://github.com/... https://twitter.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : Google and Apple have tried in the past to crack down on some of these location data brokers in their app stores, but they have been known to pop back up after being banned. https://www.wsj.com/... https://techcrunch.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : Many apps need location data to work — such as maps or weather apps — but then some also quietly sell it to data brokers. From there, it's a free for all. “Everybody sells to everybody else” Yiannis Tsiounis, the CEO of the location analytics firm Advan Research told us. https://twitter.com/... Julia Angwin / @juliaangwin : Ever wonder where your location data goes after you share it with an app? Welp, there's a $12 billion after-market for your location data. @jonkeegan and @alfredwkng have identified 47 companies that harvest, sell & trade mobile phone location data. https://themarkup.org/... @alfredwkng : New: @jonkeegan and I set out to map out the location data industry. It thrives on being hidden: “They operate on the fact that the general public and people in Washington and other regulatory centers aren't paying attention to what they're doing” https://themarkup.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This report is the industry-wide map that later scoops zoomed into. It builds on earlier investigations showing apps sharing precise location with 75+ companies and carriers peddling real-time location to middlemen, but instead of one supply chain it names the whole structure — 47 firms across collecting, aggregating, and marketplace layers, sized at $12 billion.
That framing matters because the follow-on stories are all about specific nodes in this map: family-safety app Life360 as a top broker source, experts judging Apple's and Google's enforcement insufficient, and SafeGraph retreating on Planned Parenthood data. Without this piece, those look like isolated incidents; with it, they read as features of a functioning market.
First-order effects
- The 47 named collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces now face public identification of their business model for the first time — exposure that previously only hit individual brokers like Life360 or carrier middlemen.
- App developers who grant location permissions are recast as the raw-supply layer of a $12B trade, raising scrutiny of every SDK and permission prompt feeding these pipelines.
Second-order effects
- Platform gatekeepers Apple and Google are pushed toward app store enforcement against brokers — yet the related reporting shows banned brokers reappearing and shifting to buying directly from app developers, so enforcement chases the map's edges rather than its core.
- AWS's third-party data marketplace shows where the demand side is institutionalizing: cloud platforms giving subscribers one-click access to datasets like these, which deepens the buyer pool beyond advertisers to hedge funds and retailers already flagged as customers.
Third-order effects
- If platform enforcement keeps failing while the market grows, pressure moves to Washington and Congress, where the 4th Amendment questions around purchased location data become the likelier regulatory battleground than app store rules.
- Structurally, the industry looks headed toward consolidation around marketplaces and direct-from-developer sourcing, with reputational retreats like SafeGraph's becoming selective carve-outs rather than exits.
The trend: Mobile location has matured into a full commodity market with distinct supply, aggregation, and exchange layers, and regulation is lagging the plumbing by years.